About Us
Our Mission
LOVEPAWS was originally founded as a shelter intake prevention program in 2019 with a mission of keeping pets in homes and out of our local shelters through community outreach. Our outreach efforts are targeted towards helping pet owners in low-income and underserved communities in Prince George’s and Montgomery Counties, Maryland.
At the core of our community outreach services is our pet pantry which feeds nearly 500 owned pets and community cats every month. Our other services include distribution of free life saving supplies like ID tags, leashes and no-slip collars, training assistance, and our rehoming service that moves pets from home-to-home, completely bypassing the shelter. We also help support community cats while humanely curbing the population by providing colony caretakers with food from our pantry and providing spay/neuter subsidies to support TNR efforts. We also work with caretakers to provide medical subsidies for sick and injured community cats.
Our scope and mission quickly expanded to include pulling dogs and cats from local shelters, with a focus on the pit bull type dogs of Prince George’s County (PG pitties) targeted by a decades-old county-wide breed ban. This has allowed our organization to rescue and advocate for the most at-risk animals, the true underdogs in our community, in homes, in shelters and living in colonies. We are committed to stepping forward whenever we can and wherever the need is greatest.
LOVEPAWS is a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization (EIN: 83-3122611). We are an exclusively 100% unpaid volunteer-based, foster-based rescue with our foster network spanning MD, DC, and VA.
Our Story
LOVEPAWS was started up by five passionate volunteers of the Prince George’s County Animal shelter who saw the need for providing assistance to pet owners in the community to help them keep their pets. Time and time again, they saw heartbroken owners in tears walking into the shelter to surrender their pets because they felt they had nowhere else to turn and felt the need to intervene. We continue to work with owners to help keep their pets in their homes.
It all started with Coco.
A little JRT named Coco was the inspiration for LOVEPAWS. Our founder Sonya saw Coco’s family in the parking lot of the Prince George’s County shelter after volunteering and asked them why they were surrendering Coco. They explained that Coco had masses on her belly and a bad infection in the area that they could not afford to treat. They were visibly upset bringing her to the shelter not knowing what would happen to her.
Sonya worked with Coco’s family to secure low-cost medical care for Coco to have her mammary chain removed. Once it was confirmed that her cancer had spread, Sonya and her husband took Coco into their home as a hospice foster. Coco was the smallest yet mightiest in her new pack and lived three happy, spoiled months running around the yard with her new siblings, doing a happy dance for her home-cooked dinners and snuggling on the couch with mommy and daddy.
Every animal LOVEPAWS helps is in memory of Coco and in honor of those we could not save. Thank you for inspiring us, sweet girl.