Before anything worked, everything failed.

Between 2015 and 2017, I made every business mistake imaginable trying to build a platform to support small, credible rescues. I lost money. Restarted multiple times. Burned through ideas that absolutely did not work.

But those years became my education. They taught me how donations really flow, how rescues actually operate, where the gaps are, what donors respond to, and where sustainable funding must come from. During that time, in March 2017, I formed a corporation called “One Red Lion, Inc.” In July 2017, I started, with caution, a non-profit called American Red Lion Disaster and Abuse Fund, because, besides it all, I still knew this was a problem that needed to be solved.

2018: Hurricane Florence (When It Became Real)

In 2018, I was living in Wilmington, North Carolina, when Hurricane Florence hit. Everything changed. It was my first hurricane. The media was urging people to leave.

Small rescues were crying for help:

• No transport
• No crates
• No fuel
• No emergency supplies
• Overwhelmed shelters
• People were dropping off animals at the shelters because they had nowhere to bring their pets.
• Pets were being left behind.

I evacuated to Raleigh, two hours away, through the storm, terrified because I couldn’t stop thinking about the animals left behind.

From a family member’s house, surrounded by chaos and uncertainty, I began fundraising heavily through my non-profit in real time, and donations started coming in. The moment donations cleared the bank, I sent them out immediately because rescues and animals didn’t have time to wait.

I saw firsthand what rescues truly needed: generators, crates and carriers, fencing, tarps, medicine, and transport vehicles.

One bird rescue was evacuating 40 parrots in two tiny cars because they didn’t have a van. That moment has stayed with me ever since.

Those days in Florence, fleeing a hurricane while fundraising for it, are what ignited my disaster-relief mission. And from that experience, my first business/nonprofit for animal welfare felt sustainable.

American Red Lion Disaster Fund

American Red Lion Disaster Fund Our Impact

The year before Florence, I founded The American Red Lion Disaster Fund to provide direct, immediate disaster relief for animals.

It worked because the need was real. We assisted during Hurricanes Florence and Michael, the California Camp Fire, and more. Great Nonprofits and GuideStar recognized us. Rescues started to depend on us.

During that time, all of my thoughts were reinforced, the very thing that still drives me today: “Massive disasters like Hurricanes Florence and Michael, and the California Camp Fire, create more need than any one organization can meet on its own.” The scale of suffering is simply too grand, and 90% of the rescues weren’t getting the funds they needed to do their work.

American Red Lion Disaster Fund had a clear mission: to identify credible, sustainable, boots-on-the-ground local animal welfare organizations that could immediately rescue and care for abandoned animals — and get them the funds and supplies they needed fast.

The problem was, and still is, bigger than most people realized. There were more than 25,000 animal welfare organizations, 10,000 animal hospitals, and 1.3 million livestock farms in the U.S. Yet people were donating to the same handful of big charities over and over again simply because they didn’t know who else to support. (Think HSUS, ASPCA, Best Friends, PETA, all great organizations)

Meanwhile, the small shelters, rescues, hospitals, and farms doing the most challenging, most urgent disaster work were often the ones receiving the least help. Once again, lacking compassion or manpower wasn’t the problem—lacking visibility and funding were.

That problem drove me then, and it still drives me today. But I also learned something else: a nonprofit with heart isn’t enough. I couldn’t find people to work with me on the non-profit to build it up, and without a sustainable revenue engine, it couldn’t scale. I shut it down in 2021 while working on my next venture. Animal Victory.

Animal Victory  (Building a Sustainable Platform)

In April 2019, that’s when my good friend Penny Eims and I decided to join forces.

Penny brought investigative journalism, media experience, and compassionate storytelling. I brought structure, operations, business strategy, and long-term vision.

Together, we built Animal Victory, a national petition and advocacy platform designed to:

• Expose animal abuse and neglect
• Mobilize massive public support
• Influence prosecutors and judges
• Drive real change through community pressure
• Help fund small, credible, sustainable charities for long-term impact.

It worked. It’s 2026 soon, and Animal Victory continues to grow into a powerful voice for animals across the country. In addition to our petition and advocacy work, since 2019, we have donated food and supplies totaling nearly $60,000 to small organizations and individuals. Beneficiaries.

The Birth of Animal Victory Disaster & Abuse Fund

As Animal Victory grew, our supporters began asking new questions:

• “Can we donate tax-deductible?”
• “Can you help animals during disasters?”

I already had years of disaster-relief experience. I had already lived it once with American Red Lion.

So I re-started/created the Animal Victory Disaster & Abuse Fund, an affiliated nonprofit of Animal Victory dedicated to the same mission as the American Red Lion Disaster Fund:

• Helping animals in disasters
• Providing emergency funding and supplies during crises
• Supporting pets of unhoused individuals
• Supplying funding to small local rescues
• Filling the gaps no one else fills

However, the only responsible way to launch the new non-profit fund and maintain its stability was to lean on the infrastructure we had already built for Animal Victory. The for-profit covered most of the overhead early on, and today we share those costs because it’s more efficient and because both organizations use the same resources.

 Animal Victory Fund exists because of the same simple truth: small rescues do the heaviest work in disasters, but they receive the least support.

How Funding Really Works (And Why the System Fails Animals)

As I kept researching, I learned something that honestly shocked me.

Animals don’t even have their own category in Giving USA, the most trusted annual report on charitable giving in the country.
They’re grouped under “environment,” as if their lives and suffering are an afterthought.

This is precisely why organizations like ours must fight twice as hard to get the resources animals desperately need.

And it doesn’t stop there.
Even today, it’s 2026 in three weeks, on most donation platforms, animals STILL don’t have their own dropdown category. They’re buried under “Other.”

If that doesn’t tell you where animals stand in society, nothing will: they’re at the bottom of the list.

So I dug deeper into the numbers to understand exactly what was happening.

Fast forward to 2024: Americans donated about $592 billion to charity.
Only 7.7% of that — roughly $45.6 billion — went to the combined category of Animals & Environment.

And here’s the part that completely stopped me in my tracks:

When you pull animals out of that category and separate them from environmental causes, the animal sector is estimated to receive maybe half of that amount… about $22.8 billion nationwide.

And then I learned…About 87% of all animal-related donations go to the top 1–5% of the biggest organizations.
We’re talking about groups like the ASPCA, HSUS, Best Friends — the national giants everyone recognizes.

There is nothing wrong with those organizations, but here’s the problem…

Across the U.S., there are an estimated 25,000–30,000 animal rescues, shelters, sanctuaries, advocacy groups, wildlife rehabbers, spay/neuter programs — all the small and mid-sized groups doing the gritty, daily, hands-on work.

And when the top 1–5% take in 87% of the money, that leaves about $3 billion total for the remaining 23,750–29,700 organizations.

When you break that down, it averages out to only $100,000–$125,000 per organization per year.

And honestly?

Nobody can run an animal rescue or fight cruelty cases on that. It’s impossible.
It’s why so many amazing organizations are struggling, drowning, or closing their doors entirely.

These smaller organizations and individuals within their local communities, where disasters and crises hit, are the people:

• Pulling animals from cruelty cases
• Bottle-feeding newborns
• Rescuing during disasters
• Treating abused and abandoned animals
• Saying yes to the ones nobody else wants

Once again, I repeat, they have the passion. They have the manpower. What they don’t have is the funding.

Over the past 3.5 years, the Animal Victory Disaster Fund has researched and worked hand in hand with these people, donating funds and supplies totaling nearly $246,000. I like to calculate $30.00 per animal, less the approximate charity overhead, which could very well mean we have helped close to 5000 animals with some basic care or rescue because of YOU!

Why People Abuse Animals (The Four Categories)

I have learned that the majority of animal abuse for dogs and cats falls into four major categories: Dogs and Cats have become our niche as they are our closest companions to humans, and the most neglected, in that order.

• Neglect (passive abuse)
• Intentional cruelty (active abuse)
• Overpopulation
• Commercial exploitation (puppy mills and backyard breeding)

The number one abuse is neglect — people who are overwhelmed, broke, uneducated, indifferent, or who should not own animals.

Then, Intentional cruelty comes into play and is often tied to mental illness, trauma, power and control, domestic violence, displaced aggression, or thrill-seeking and sadism.

Next is overpopulation, and this causes suffering for millions: up to 70 million homeless dogs and cats in the U.S. at any time, with 6–8 million entering shelters each year. There are simply too many dogs and cats and not enough homes.

Finally, Puppy mills and backyard breeders fuel a constant cycle of trauma, illness, and unwanted litters.

Until animals have rights, we curb the population, and courts treat abuse seriously, the cycle will continue.

The Solutions (What Actually Works)

I believe real solutions will come from a mix of courage, collaboration, and structural change.

1. Organizations must work together

Most rescues work alone, not because they want to, but because sharing donors feels like risking their survival. Each organization is a business, and it needs its donors to fund it. Yet no single rescue can solve this crisis alone.

2. Fix the roots: rights and population control

Everything comes back to two foundational issues: animals need meaningful legal rights, and population control must be accessible everywhere. If we fix those two things, half the problem disappears immediately.

3. I believe the younger generation will finish what we’ve started

They question everything. They refuse cruelty. They care deeply. I think they will carry this movement across the finish line.

My Commitment

Everything I build, every petition, every nonprofit initiative, every disaster response, comes down to that.

This is the mission I was born for. And I will keep going as long as animals need us.

Janelle Babington
Founder & Chief Vision Officer
Animal Victory & Animal Victory Fund