Despite road construction, I easily found the bold sunrise-orange awnings at Best Friends’ Lifesaving Center in Salt Lake City. The organization’s 2025 nationwide initiative to “Save Them All” is a bold rallying call. Though I’ve long been grateful for the technological and legal ability to end insufferable pain faced by my other-than-human family members, the same tech and legal structures have too long enabled our society to  look away from systems that kill companion animals for no good reason. A helpful gift turned barbaric is being turned around again, and with over 3400 Network Partners across the country, Best Friends Animal Society (based in Kanab, UT) leads the way by sharing resources and ideas to detach the concept of “killing surplus animals” from our ways of “sheltering” animals who are temporarily without homes.

The many benefits of this shift (and the 2025 goal) continue to ripple into and across our world. Community-supported animal welfare efforts have created shelter environments where staff—from kennel techs to managers, and veterinarians to event organizers—WANT to work. Far from removing a life-or-death urgency once believed to be the best way to attract (ie bully) adopters, this shift has expanded necessary legions of foster families to assist. Volunteers flock to help, and to spread the word about their adoptable friends.

Even so, these direct support changes can’t succeed without “upstream” initiatives, and here too BFAS faces challenges head-on, organizing resources for others to grow the positive impacts for all. Mobile spay-neuter programs, legislative work like ending breed discrimination and puppy mills, behavioral assistance, you name it, they’ve probably got a connection that continues to move the needle. And you don’t need to take my word for any of this. Find your own connections:  from bottle-feeding kittens with your kids to driving seniors and their animal companions to veterinary appointments, from designing wall graphics to creating celebratory music instead of discharging fireworks—whatever you do with others’ needs foremost in your mind will bounce back in ripples of good will and emotional satisfaction.