News, ideas & inspiration from industry leaders
Word on the Street with Chris Ramon
January 16, 2026, The Association
Pasadena Humane’s President & CEO shares a secret behind their foster program’s year-over-year growth
The Association’s Katherine Shenar recently sat down with industry leaders for a candid convo on insights from the 2025 State of Shelter Adoptions Report. One important topic they explored—how foster programs are changing the landscape. You can listen to the complete podcast here and read on for Chris Ramon’s high-level strategy.
At least on the west coast, it feels like it starts to rain kittens around the end of March, beginning of April, for the following nine months. Right alongside adoption, foster is our biggest call to action for the community. We want to make becoming a foster as easy as possible, and we recruit year-round.
We’ve learned that we want to start planting those seeds early on, by getting a lot of that foster onboarding and training done. It starts with an online orientation that goes over our disinfection and medical protocols.
This ensures that once our population starts to burst at the seams, our foster program, which for nine months out of the year is one of our primary levers in housing capacity, is ready to go. We cool down a little bit during the holidays, but come January, we start recruiting and really diving into what the need is going to look like later on in the year.
– Chris Ramon, President & CEO, Pasadena Humane
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