Martha Armstrong has worked with nonprofit organizations for 30 years and has been an animal welfare executive in California, Massachusetts, Tennessee and, locally, in Arlington. In January, she took over as executive director of the Animal Welfare League of Alexandria. She owns just one pet but works on the behalf of furry critters everywhere.
How did you get involved in nonprofit animal welfare work?
This started when I was 3 — I was an accountant before I lost my mind and got involved with this line of work.
What kinds of things have you done since you’ve started in Alexandria, and what do you hope to achieve in the near future?
As you can well imagine, it’s very tight times. We’ve worked really closely with the city figuring out what are the ways we can maximize our relationship with them. Also, we are trying to maximize our donor dollars, as well as mitigate animal homelessness and pet overpopulation. Most of what I’ve been doing here is to lessen my learning curve while bringing in more industry standards to our organization.
What are some other challenges?
We have a great adoption rate here, but when you’re dealing with older pets, you have to think about how to market them. A 10-year-old cat may need more vet trips and medicines than a 3-month-old kitten but still has many marketable attributes and be more settled than that youngster. These are very challenging times financially for pet owners, which is causing more older animals to be given up to us.
How else can you get the word out?
We are open seven days a week, six days a week for adoption. We have evening hours four nights a week. We are always looking for volunteers. We’re really trying to build our foster care program — when we get neonatal kittens in, if people want to give five to six weeks to prepare them for adoption, that’s great.
