GRAND PRIZE $1,500 in free services from Texas Litter Control!
GRAND PRIZE $1,500 in free services from Texas Litter Control!
The conference fees are waived thanks to a sponsorship from Merck Animal Health. Register by September 18, 2022 for this free conference. Fees at the door will be $25.00.
Sessions will include updates from the most of the major shelters and other topics relevant to the animal welfare community.
8:00am - 9:00am - Vendor Set Up
9:00am - 9:30am - Registration and Networking Breakfast
9:30am - Houston Collaboration Projects - Noelle Delgado, Houston Pets Alive! and Deana Sellens, Texas Litter Control
10:30am - Shannon Parker, Harris County
11:30pm - Houston BARC
12:30pm - Networking Lunch
1:30pm - Deyra Galvan, Best Friends and Sophia Proler, Best Friends
2:30pm - Montgomery County Animal Shelter
3:30pm - Barbara Vass, Fort Bend County
4:30pm - 6:00pm - Cocktails, Finger Foods and Networking
5:30pm - Grand Prize Drawing - MUST BE PRESENT TO WIN!
10:30am Grant Writing 101 - Becky Best, Independent Consultant
11:30am Volunteer Management - Natalie Mendez, Houston Pets Alive!
1:30pm TLC Education Station Projects - Deana Sellens, Texas Litter Control
2:30pm Social Media 101 - Autumn Rivett, Texas Litter Control
Deyra came to Best Friends from a background in Architecture and public service. Growing up an animal advocate and with pets all her life and volunteering with shelters and rescue groups. She was introduced to Best Friends whole designing and building a non prodigy cat café in Los Angeles pre Hurricane a Harvey and has been with the Houston team since 2018. Her passion for people and pets is a natural fit connecting community members and groups together to help Houston.
She has 3 dogs, Sasha B, Maxwell Cooper and Andy Smurf
Barbara Vass has been with Fort Bend County Animal Services since August 2014. Starting as a volunteer and co-founder of FBCAS’ first non-profit organization focusing on advocacy when the save rate for the shelter was about 23%. Shortly after taking on the Volunteer Coordinator role in November 2014, she founded a new 501c3 organization to facilitate fundraising and rescue. In January 2015 new leadership was in place, several programs were implemented, and by October 2015, the save rate for dogs reached 90% and has remained there since. One month later, Fort Bend County Animal Services hired Barbara as their Adoption Coordinator.
In October 2016, she became the Community Involvement Coordinator working with community partners to continue towards positive outcomes for the shelter pets and trying to develop more outreach opportunities to bring awareness to the shelter and the pets, particularly community cats. By 2018, efforts to amend the leash law ordinance in the County to include community cats was finally successful and in June 2018, the pilot program for TNR/SNR began. In August 2018, the overall save rate for FBCAS reached 90% for the first time and we just celebrated four years of remaining at that 90% or greater.
In 2021, Barbara became the Assistant Director and Lifesaving Programs Manager for FBCAS. Having co-founded a third 501c3 focusing specifically on fundraising, her focus now is to continue to improve on the lifesaving efforts of the shelter through new and innovative programs. As the FBCAS grant writer, solicit funds to develop initiatives to help keep pets in their homes and work with County and community partners on outreach efforts to help our underserved communities.
Shannon Parker is the Outreach Program Manager for the Harris County Pets Resource Center. Her position oversees the foster, rescue, transport, volunteer and law enforcement training departments. Her duties also include managing all shelter events, promotions, social media, website, signage and marketing. Shannon comes from 20+ years of commercial real estate marketing and PR experience. She has been an avid and constant foster mom for the past 15 years starting her rescue career with Dachshund Rescue of Houston. She personally has 3 dogs and one cat. Her position allows her to bring her fosters to work with her so she most often has neonatal kittens or senior pit bulls as fosters.
Nikki is the Deputy Shelter Director for the City of Houston's animal shelter "BARC." She has been in this role for a year and a half.
Noelle Delgado is the Executive Director of Houston Pets Alive!, a rescue committed to saving the lives of companion cats and dogs and finding them loving homes. Her work in rescue, though relatively brief, capitalizes on her greatest passion: bringing remarkable people together to support their communities. Noelle supports a team of three leadership staff, seven managers, one veterinarian, 18 staff members, 53 partnerships, 500 fosters, 1,100 volunteers and 3,000 animals annually.
Before graduating with a Bachelor's Degree in Social Science from Southeast Missouri State University, Noelle began her search for meaning as the founder, and Chief Executive Officer of Girl Force USA, an organization dedicated to helping girls grow to be confident, powerful, women, where she was recognized by the California State Legislature for her exemplary leadership and service.
Her prior experience includes serving as Corporate Partnerships and Events Manager, at Eisner Health, where she planned, fundraised, and executed over 22 events annually, and managed partnerships with over 50 corporations, including Quest Diagnostics, FIGS, and Dignity Health. Noelle also served as Manager of External Affairs at Kheir Clinic in Los Angeles, the only Federally Qualified Health Center that provides primary medical care, housing, and social services in over seven languages. Noelle was responsible for managing over $7M in both private foundation and government funding and managing community relations with underserved and uninsured communities. Through her work with Kheir Clinic, Noelle cultivated and managed relationships with Bank of America, AT&T, Anthem Foundation, Wells Fargo, United Way, Nothrop Grumman, and Gilead Pharmaceuticals, to name just a few.
Noelle's dedication to community service, doesn’t stop with her day job. Noelle founded Project Sodality, a leadership and empowerment cooperative dedicated to facilitating the development of women and their communities through meaningful connections and experiences. From this group, more than 30 community engagement efforts have been led, affecting well over 400+ community members and counting!
While saving the world through meaningful work never gets old, it does get exhausting! Noelle spends her downtime traveling the world in search of great books and great cocktails or by binge watching the the Netflix Top 10 list. She lives in the clouds with her partner, Henry, and their three TVs in Galleria.
Natalie Mendez has been working with youth & foster kids for over ten years, helping them discover their potential and build a bright future. She has travelled the world promoting social justice. She worked for organizations such as the salvation army and the boys and girls club. Since then, she has shifted her focus to another of her passions: animal welfare. She is currently a volunteer coordinator at Houston Pets Alive.
Mark Wysocki is the Assistant Director for Montgomery County Animal Services. He joined MCAS in April of 2016. Mark comes from 25+ years in the private sector working for Fortune 500 companies as well as two of the “Big Four” Accounting/Consulting Firms. During that time he worked in new country startups, Sales, IT, HR, Acquisitions and Business Development. He has a MBA in International Business and Certificate training in Animal Welfare.
Autumn trained in retail social media from 2006-2013. She created social media platforms for a rescue in 2009 and maintained until 2013. Started back up with TLC in 2019 until now.
Autumn has been involved in rescue and adoptions for twenty years and TNR for about 15.
Deana Sellens is the Executive Director and Founder of Texas Litter Control. TLC is a low cost spay/neuter and wellness clinic for cats and dogs performing over 20,000 spay/neuter surgeries per year between TLC’s 3 locations. The organization also has 3 adoption centers for cats, a shelter intervention program, and they mentor other people and groups in opening high quality, high volume spay/neuter clinics. Deana was instrumental in changing the Montgomery County ordinance to protect community cats and she started the community cat program.
Deana founded another spay/neuter clinic in 2009. The clinic performed over 20,000 surgeries while she ran it. She served on the boards for 2 different animal welfare organizations in Houston as the Director of Fund-raising. Deana has been a volunteer in animal rescue for 13 years. Her rescue experience includes fostering cats and dogs, neo-natal care, website development, fund-raising, marketing, trap/neuter/return and public relations. She also sat on the initial Steering Committee for Spay/Texas.
Deana’s background is actually in operations and risk management for the bankcard industry. She is a 13 year veteran to the bankcard industry. In addition to her Loss Prevention work, Deana has assisted in software design/ implementation projects and has written manuals for countless companies. Deana has served as the President and Secretary of the Gulf Coast Chapter of the International Association for Financial Crimes Investigators, as a Board Member of the Houston Metropolitan Criminal Investigators Association and as an advisor on 2 US Secret Service task forces dealing with terrorism and technology crimes.
For 20 years, Becky Best served as a corporate social responsibility leader in the financial services industry, focusing on employee engagement, community relations, and grantmaking. Wanting a break from the corporate grind, she followed her passion for pets in need and began working as an animal welfare grant-maker and program manager. Today, Becky combines this experience with her previous work in public relations and journalism to offer consulting and contract services to animal welfare nonprofits and small businesses.
She earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism, an MBA in strategic management, and an accreditation in public relations.
Becky has overseen the distribution of more than $21 million in grant funding during her career and has successfully written several grants since joining the animal welfare industry. She looks forward to sharing her tips on finding and applying for grants during her Grant-writing 101 presentation.
Sophia Proler is a native Houstonian who started in animal welfare at a small rural shelter in Montana. Since then, Sophia has worked on Hurricane Harvey emergency relief efforts, served as the volunteer and foster coordinator at BARC, and rebuilt the community outreach programs at an open-intake shelter outside of Austin. In her role at Best Friends, Sophia leads the Lifesaving Outcomes team.
Texas Litter Control DBA United Pet Rescuers Conference is a Texas Non Profit Corporation and a 501c3 public charity. All donations are deductible to the full extent allowed by law.
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