As Wishalizer.org founder and many-hats-wearer, Valerie Asensio looked for her family’s most recent rescue dog, she thought that with her tech background, and that she’d just exited another business, there must be something she could do to help these sweet things that languish in kennels day after day, week after week, and some much longer.
But she found the immensity of the problem disheartening. It’s easy to see the ocean as a whole and think there’s no way across. Looking at a big problem all at once is often an impediment to solving it. So, she proceeded to break the problem down and start by finding wood to build a boat. Look, there’s a tree!
No kill shelters => Longer stay animals => More resources
With the advent of no-kill shelters, the number of rescue animals waiting for homes has skyrocketed. No-kill as a concept is wonderful, but it creates a challenge for already cash-and-staff-strapped organizations: how to maintain these longer-stay animals without any additional resources?
Nerd to the rescue
Valerie tells us, “I wanted to build an app that would be a force-multiplier for good, to direct in-kind donations of needed items to animal welfare organizations. We should be able to connect rescue animals and the people who help them with the things they need using accessible, easy-to-use technology. That’s my goal.”
How do we know what the animals need?
Many shelters, rescues and service organizations have wish lists. Valerie thought, “Boom! Here’s the opportunity for goodness to happen—this connects the circuit. I have data.” Wishalizer.org finds, and aggregates the wish list needs for animal welfare organizations and makes them searchable via the familiar search engine metaphor. Only, this search engine is 100% rescue-animal related, thus curated to a localized deep focus.
A work in progress
The web application was launched in Austin at the Capital Factory’s 2016 Pre-SXSW ATX Startup Crawl, and is under continuous development/deployment. But there are already over 3,000 searchable wish list items needed by rescue animals. This is what it does today, but there is much more in the pipeline, including an iOS app, an API server, and expanding to national coverage.
Back to the ocean
The wider view is that there are many organizations that do good in concert with animals. Wishalizer.org seeks to assist them all: organizations that train service dogs, and organizations that use animals for therapy, wild animal rescues. It’s an ocean, and we’re on the shore.
We’re gonna need more trees
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