Animal Shelter Tools

The Why

One of the things that I really love about our small team at Virtu is that we encourage each other's interests with internal initiatives. In the summer of 2024, we decided to work with small businesses at a much smaller rate. We love interacting with our community in Asheville, NC and helping to solve technical problems.

My interest with this small business initiative was working with local shelters and humane societies. Throughout high school and undergrad, I always made time to volunteer with my communities and working with shelters was my favorite way to give back.

Through those experiences, I learned that most shelters are working with little to no budget outside of the costs it takes to care for the animals. Most are completely volunteer run, so they don't even pay their staff. Adding on any technical memberships or fees is an added financial stress.

The how

I built a few templated sites that shelters could input their information into and share how people could adopt, donate, and interact with their organizations. I had the option to connect to existing platforms like Petfinder for displaying adoptable animals, or using a CMS that I built. My tech stack was (my trusty, go-to) React/ Remix/ React Router, Typescript, Tailwind CSS, and Sanity CMS for the custom CMS option. For the templated sites, I had a few that worked with outside APIs where needed, like fetching the Petfinder listings.

These templates are available for any shelter that is in need of a website or CMS tool for public display of adoptable animals. I can help set you up, link to your domain, and get you live! I'm waving my building fees and hosting will be free. You don't have to be in the Asheville area to use these. Feel free to send me a message, mandyhartmandev@gmail.com

A not-so-fun postscript: Asheville was impacted by hurricane Helene shortly after sharing this post and starting this initiative, so our work with local shelters was put on pause. If you work at a shelter and want to use these free templates and resources, please reach out! I'd be happy to see this be put to good use!