The Humane Society of Southern Arizona (HSSA) has a new leader. Dr. Kristin Barney took over as CEO in May. She knew she had a hard job ahead of her, but both she and the board of directors have confidence that she will succeed.
“(Dr. Barney) can quickly garner authentic trust and confidence with those that she works with and talks to,” HSSA board member Jennifer Beattie said. “I feel that she’s got true love and passion for the work we do, for the animal welfare space and connecting humans with their future pets.”
“The Humane Society of Southern Arizona is an organization that is in transition,” Barney said. “We have had a change in leadership and we are looking to evolve to better meet the needs of our community so I think that my skills in change management and leadership practices really align with the needs of the organization right now.”
After last year’s debacle with more than 100 missing pets, Barney and the board of directors are firm that it will never happen again at HSSA.
“The message is not, ‘Look at what we’re doing differently,’ because truly we’ve been doing (animal lifesaving work) for 80 years and obviously, not consistently,” Barney said. “Not to lessen what happened but I also don’t want to diminish all of the lifesaving work that’s been done before we got to that point, so we are doing more of that and we’re looking at how we can do it better, but we’ve always been a lifesaving organization.”
Barney’s first task has been to understand how the organization works and to see where changes might need to be made. However, she is careful about making sweeping decisions.
“I think it’s respectful for me to understand the landscape before I make any kind of major changes,” she said. “A lot of my time has been spent asking questions and getting feedback from the people who are doing this work to understand what needs to be changed and what we would benefit from changing.”
Still, she has already identified one area where she feels change needs to take place.
“We have been giving a lot of attention to our rescue program and really working to build that out, expand it and do that in a way that aligns with best practices” Barney said. “I think that’s one of our first priorities in terms of expanding, growing, changing. We don’t have a large rescue pool. I’m trying to understand why that is and work with our team to grow that.”
When Barney said rescue pool, she was referring to “qualified organizations that will take animals that might need a little more support,” she said.
Barney comes to the position with plenty of relevant experience. She has worked with Best Friends Animal Society’s national shelter embed program where she was stationed in Tulsa, Oklahoma Animal Welfare for one year. Most recently she was a senior director of lifesaving programs at Best Friends, working with animal welfare professionals across the western United States. From 2014 to 2016, Barney served as the chief of operations at Pima Animal Care Center (PACC), one of HSSA’s critical partners. In addition, Barney has a master’s degree in administration from NAU and an Ed.D in organizational leadership from Pepperdine University, where she focused on best practices of animal services directors in lifesaving communities.
It’s all prepared her to lead the HSSA through this particular time in its history. It’s also what impressed Beattie, who led the HSSA’s search committee when they were looking for a new CEO.
“Dr. Barney had some really good experience at Tucson Animal Welfare while she was at Best Friends where she really worked on community engagement and rebuilding compromised or broken relationships,” Beattie said. “As you can imagine, we’re going to have some work to do on that front ourselves.”
That includes repairing relationships with donors, volunteers, staff members, and other organizations.
“Everybody’s had a hard road to go and we’ve got to build the team back up,” Beattie added. “We’re really looking forward to building relationships with other animal welfare organizations, people who are experts in their space and Dr. Barney came with that network and knows how to leverage that network to be able to help us. The board is very interested in building those relationships and making sure we’re following best practices at every turn.”
Not only did HSSA lose donations, but it also lost volunteers. Barney is looking for new volunteers who have a heart for animals and want to help them find their new families.
“We always need people to help us with the hands-on elements of the work we do, so walking or socializing the animals and providing enrichment,” Barney said. “It would be really beneficial to have people who can help us as we’re building out our rescue program to be making phone calls and advocating for animals alongside us.”
The organization also needs people who can do paperwork.
Barney said they will take as many hours as volunteers have to give, whether that’s an hour once a week or several hours during the week. They will take weekend hour- or evening hour-volunteers.
“Our animals need care seven days a week and we take volunteers seven days a week, morning through the evening,” she said.
