Santa Fe animal shelter hires new CEO | Regional Information

Hagerman, 45, replaces previous Executive Director Jennifer Steketee, who has retired but designs to volunteer with the nonprofit shelter by fostering animals. Steketee, who beforehand served as a veterinarian at the shelter, experienced served in its prime work considering the fact that 2016.

Hagerman is the shelter’s to start with main executive officer. The title will come from an organizational restructuring, he mentioned, but the career will include things like the identical obligations as those people of a director.

He and a spokesman for the shelter both declined to disclose his wage.

The most modern federal tax filings publicly obtainable exhibit Steketee earned more than $157,000 in compensation in 2019 as government director. The shelter holds all-around $15 million in property, the documents demonstrate.

Wage and positive aspects for Steketee’s predecessor, Mary Martin, totaled approximately $188,000, according to tax paperwork. Martin also lived lease-free in a property the shelter had bought.

Hagerman said in an interview Tuesday he grew up weak in the Inland Empire, a sprawling spot east of Los Angeles. He invested his youth tooling all-around the neighborhood, finding up stray animals and nursing them back again to overall health.

He explained since he was shy, he didn’t have a lot of good friends. “Spending time with my animal mates was the way that I favored to commit my time.”

Hagerman overcame his shyness and commenced doing work as a advertising, communications and community relations professional in the health treatment business, he mentioned. “I was all set to consider a step again and concentration on a passion project.”

In 2012, he and his associate at the time moved to Spring Green, Wis., the place they started off a farm and conservation organization for critically endangered livestock. The procedure grew speedily, and just before lengthy, they ended up internet hosting extra than 400 animals representing 17 endangered species.

“Making the change to animal welfare was in fact a fairly uncomplicated shift to make,” he mentioned. “If you consider about how hospitals and clinics operate, it is variety of equivalent to how shelters operate.”

When the romantic relationship finished in 2016, Hagerman moved back again to Los Angeles and started functioning as vice president of operations and neighborhood engagement at the Pasadena Humane animal shelter.

“It was a extremely particular time to be a part of animal welfare simply because, as the pandemic arrived, the sector began to fully reshape and reengineer itself and give support to the local community in a unique way,” he said. “And I bought to be a part of making that.”

He moved to New Mexico on Nov. 1 and stepped into his purpose at the regional shelter.

The Santa Fe Animal Shelter & Humane Society opened in 1939. It now has a 100-acre campus at 100 Caja del Rio Highway with trails and playgrounds for puppies and their caretakers.

It also operates the Clare Eddy Thaw Animal Healthcare facility and two off-campus retail merchants.

The retail retailers and the animal healthcare facility convey in the majority of its profits, along with fundraisers, charitable donations and regional authorities contracts.

The nonprofit shelter fosters and permanently locations animals, and delivers behavioral schooling classes for publish-adoption pets. It supplies assistance to disadvantaged pet house owners, as well as education and outreach in the group.

It now has close to 240 animals — together with canines, cats, rabbits, ferrets, guinea pigs, reptiles and birds — down from 360 at the commencing of November.

A shelter’s chaotic period ordinarily operates from spring by summertime, Hagerman mentioned, and populations fall in the tumble as the amount of strays lessen with colder temperature.

The shelter faced major scrutiny in 2018, when two members of its board resigned, citing running losses and questionable small business deals involving the shelter, some of its board customers and former executive director Martin.

Hagerman said those people difficulties are in the past.

“Our latest board of directors is only concerning two and 3 decades aged,” he claimed. “Whatever was happening again then has not been taking place for a variety of a long time now.”

Despite a staffing scarcity because of to the coronavirus pandemic, he mentioned the shelter is executing very well. “Our treatment of the animals is fantastic,” he explained.

Likely ahead, he explained he will concentration on supplying more group sources. One particular strategy he stated was making a pet food financial institution to assist pet owners who are having difficulties fiscally.

“We’ve began to see a extraordinary change from housing animals in shelters to acquiring actually sturdy foster applications,” he reported, including animals do much better in a house than they do in a shelter. “The pandemic seriously assisted put that into quickly movement.”

“Even if it’s only for a momentary interval of time,” Hagerman said, “an animal’s going to do considerably improved in a foster property than they will do in a kennel.”