Unleashing a Passion

Ellen Jefferson ’93 never planned to be an entrepreneur: she just knew she wanted to help animals.

As the director of Austin Pets Alive! and the founder of nonprofits Emancipet and San Antonio Pets Alive!, Jefferson has helped to save tens of thousands of animals in the process.

And during the unprecedented challenges of the COVID-19 era, Jefferson is also spearheading a national coalition of animal services leaders known as Human Animal Support Services (HASS). This initiative is paving the way for local government shelters across major metros such as Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C., to redirect funding towards reuniting pets and owners in the field, instead of the current model of dragging every stray or lost animal to a shelter across town, where there might not be enough space.

“We need to support, not punish, pets and their owners,” Jefferson says. “HASS is still a pilot program, but we’re working with 40 shelters already, and the response has been tremendous so far.”

Whether adapting to new challenges or strengthening her existing projects, Jefferson has built a career around both her entrepreneurial and science skill sets. 

“I didn’t know I was entrepreneurial in college,” says Jefferson, who was a biology major. “But what makes you an entrepreneur is seeing the ‘gaps’ in an industry, problems to be solved, and trying to solve them. So, now, I don’t even think of myself as a doctor, so much as an entrepreneur.”

After graduating from Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine in 1997, Jefferson started discovering just how many “gaps” existed in the world of stray animal care. After moving to Austin, she found herself in a heartbreaking situation.

Jefferson was working at a municipal animal shelter, in a room with two tables: at the first table, Jefferson was performing spay and neuter operations. That’s when she saw an entire family of Chow Chows enter the room. The mother was led into the room first, followed by her puppies.

But the family wasn’t headed for Jefferson’s table. The clinic was using the adjacent table for euthanasia.

Reader, we’ll spare you the story that Jefferson told us in heartbreaking detail. You can understand why Jefferson says that “It was, literally, the worst experience of my life.”

For every one spay/neuter Jefferson would do, it seemed like 10 other animals would lose their lives. Deeply affected, Jefferson founded Emancipet, a nonprofit that offers low-cost spay/neuter services across Austin. “I thought that it would be easier to spay/neuter as many community pets as I could and that would cause the shelter to not have to kill,” she explains. The nonprofit has spayed or neutered nearly 350,000 dogs and cats to this day.

In 2008, Jefferson left Emancipet to helm Austin Pets Alive! (APA), an innovative nonprofit that acts as a shelter, wellness clinic, and hospital all in one, as well as provides a pet foster program. The organization aimed to make Austin a “No-Kill” city and has increased the annual survival rate of pets entering municipal shelters from 45% to as high as 98% in recent years. APA was actually so successful that the organization started saving animals on a regional level outside the city, and to date has saved an estimated total of more than 90,000 pets since 2008.

Jefferson brought innovative solutions to APA, including starting a parvovirus clinic in her home bathroom and launching the nation’s first neonatal kitten nursery modeled after a program she saw while working at a wildlife sanctuary.  

Jefferson extended her entrepreneurial and innovative spirit to launch a spinoff, San Antonio Pets Alive! (SAPA), in 2012, which encountered an even more dire set of odds.

In the mid-2000s, San Antonio was killing more animals per capita than any other large city in the nation, with a death rate reaching as high as 95%, according to information provided by city officials. Even with a municipal shelter, private humane societies, and rescue groups, the city was missing a nonprofit partner as an additional resource. In 2011, assistant city manager and Trinity grad Erik Walsh ’91—now San Antonio city manager—was scouring the country for a solution. He contacted Jefferson.

Again, Jefferson put on her entrepreneurship hat and tried to mirror the APA model with SAPA. The challenges were many: limited resources that amounted to a lack of shelter space and existing infrastructure, as well as smaller staffing. “This was about more than just feeding animals,” Jefferson explains. “We need to be monitoring health, treating disease. These are the things that transform a shelter from a place that just exterminates pets.”

Despite the odds, Jefferson and her team helped increase the survival release rate for animals from an anemic 33.5% up to 81.3% by 2015. Currently, the nonprofit operates two facilities in San Antonio and has taken in as many as 7,800 pets annually.

While Jefferson stepped away from SAPA in 2015, she is currently growing another venture–American Pets Alive!, a nationwide educational program of APA that trains and empowers animal shelter nonprofits to increase their save rates. 

“There are still so many adoptable animals dying, and a lot of improvement needed,” Jefferson says. “Big dogs are still one of the hardest populations to save.”

These problems, Jefferson continues, aren’t ever going to be convenient to solve. Obstacles like this don’t wait around for a savior with a perfect skillset.

“One of the biggest epiphanies for me is how little is already solved, and how much room for opportunity there is to fill the gaps,” Jefferson says. “I still struggle with impostor syndrome: I never took a class on how to found a company, or be an executive director at a shelter and make change. But the reality is that there’s so much need right now, people need to just roll up their sleeves and get things done.”

And Jefferson is seeing the value of this mindset, even during an international pandemic. With shelters at risk of closing temporarily, American Pets Alive launched a frenetic effort to ramp up its foster program, in addition to the HASS project. “In the past few months alone, we’ve seen an outpouring of support from our foster network. We saw almost 3,000 more animals saved than usual—it took off like crazy.”

Getting things done, Jefferson explains, isn’t about which major you choose, or how talented you are. “You become an entrepreneur because you’re doing the work; you don’t do the work because you’re an entrepreneur.”