Vision for the Future

Imagine a World — Seattle Humane’s Storyline

Seattle Humane is one of the region’s leaders in animal adoption, education and welfare. Our top priorities are to connect animals in need of rescue with loving families, and keep pets with the people who love them. Through our outreach, advocacy, and services we strive to ensure that animal companionship is accessible to all.

Seattle Humane is proud to share our Storyline, an aspirational document intended to paint a clear picture of where we see ourselves in 2026 and beyond.

The Storyline builds upon our rich past and present, using our greatest strengths to address the community’s evolving needs. We are committed to serving more pets and define success not just by how many pets we adopt into loving homes, but also by the number of pets we serve in the community and prevent from entering the animal sheltering system entirely. Our goal is to lift the entire animal welfare community up together and create the best possible world for the pets in our collective care.

Seattle Humane’s Storyline comes from months of research and discussion leading up to a two-day envisioning session in June 2021 that brought together our senior leadership team, board members, academics and other experts in the field of animal welfare and veterinary medicine. The group had many deep and thoughtful conversations to reach a better understanding of how Seattle Humane contributes locally and nationally, and asked where can we have the greatest impact leveraging the tools we’ve developed over the last century.

We start this journey by sharing our Storyline with you, the community we serve, while simultaneously conducting market research and analysis that will inform our work. We will then develop detailed operating plans with clear metrics and goals to define success over the next five years.

We commit to always be transparent and forthright with our planning, and truly believe that together we can build a better world for pets and the people who love them. We look forward to partnering together with others who share the same goals to realize this collective vision for a more equitable, accessible and humane world.

If our future plans speak to your head, heart and love of animals, we hope you will join all of us here at Seattle Humane on this exciting journey.