Oct. 12 – After months of searching, the Santa Fe Animal Shelter & Humane Society has found its permanent leader in new CEO Jackie Roach.
Roach’s animal welfare experiences include volunteering at the Nebraska Humane Society, founding a foster-based, all-volunteer rescue organization for huskies and malamutes called Taysia Blue Rescue and serving as director of strategic partnerships for Best Friends Animal Society in Arkansas, where she led the launch of the Pet Resource Center. She said she, her four dogs and her husband, Mike, are entering her fourth week of work and feel at home in Santa Fe and love the dry heat and the food, especially the green chile.
The New Mexican recently spoke with Roach to learn more about her vision for the shelter and her role in it.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Q: How would you describe your leadership style, and how do you hope to apply it in your role in the shelter?
Answer: It’s a very collaborative style. I think servant leadership is very important. I expect my team to do their job, and I trust them to do their job, and I want to help them be the best they can be in their work. And so the opportunities for training and improving their skills are very important to me, and I want their opinion. I want to make sure we have everyone at the table when we make decisions. Because if we make a decision during the operation, it will have consequences for philanthropy, for communication and for the clinic. So make sure everyone has a seat at the table and understands how we all interact with each other.
Q: What are the key values and philosophies that will guide your decisions and policies in running the shelter?
Answer: I actually sat down before I started my job and wrote down my resolutions. I ask the team to hold me accountable for the intentions because I think it’s very important if I want to hold my team accountable, they have to be able to hold me accountable. Number one: be curious about the things I don’t understand. So I can make decisions very quickly, but I have to understand the why and all the nuances. Be clear, direct and transparent with everyone. Lead with humility and admit my own mistakes. And I make them every day. Communicate with kindness and integrity, even when we have to deliver bad news or difficult news. I think it’s just important to be really respectful. And especially to be present and get to know the employees and the work they do.
Q: How have your previous positions prepared you for this position? Are there any specific initiatives or programs you have been working on that you would like to introduce or expand here?
Answer: I think in my previous roles I have always managed teams and led teams. In e-commerce, which has nothing to do with animal welfare, we had to work as a team and create synergy. … And I love numbers, I love budgets, data, and so that’s always been part of what I’ve adopted from other organizations. [Going into] an organization can look at data and say, “Okay, what lever do we need to push and pull to help this happen?”
I mean, obviously at Taysia Blue Rescue I’m very passionate about foster care. Animals, cats and dogs do not belong in a shelter anyway. …Animal shelters are not healthy places. The best in the world is not a healthy place. It’s like being on a cruise ship when you’re in COVID-19. I mean, diseases can spread very quickly. So it’s not physically healthy, and animals get very stressed, and mentally they deteriorate. And so I’m a big believer in foster care and getting animals into foster homes.
I think we do a pretty good job of having animals in foster homes. I’d like to see some more of that here. In my previous role, foster parents could bring the animals back to the center during the day and they almost had a daycare experience. And so if you have a foster animal and you have to go to work, well, “I’m going to take them back to the center, and they’ll have play groups, and they’ll have some walks and maybe some training during the day, and then I’ll pick them up and take them I take them home. And in the meantime, maybe they can be adopted too because they are here.
Question: Under past leadership, the community had some concerns about the shelter’s practices and policies, such as pausing the trap release program and the Capacity for Care model. What are your thoughts on these policies and concerns? How have they evolved since then? And what will be your approach to these issues?
Answer: Before my arrival, the board had established two task forces. One was specific to cats and the other was around policy and really understanding that capacity for care and how that will shape policy. … So to be honest, I don’t really know where we are with those task forces. I hope we get to a point where we wrap up and we hear those recommendations. As I understand it, they are internal and community members who are part of each of the task forces, so still waiting for the results of that.
I probably have all kinds of opinions of my own, but they are not based on Santa Fe and specific to what is happening here. So right now I just want to listen and understand what’s going on. I want to understand the community because that’s where I think [are] lessons we can learn from what’s happening in other places, but we’re still a unique community, and I think we all need to keep that in mind.
Whenever I’ve looked at Capacity for Care, I think that’s always been on my mind [it] as a tool. I think it’s good to understand that we have X number of kennels and X number of staff. That’s pretty finite. And if we exceed the number of kennels, we can’t just fill them all because then the animals can’t be moved and there’s no isolation space for disease control. And the more animals we have in a population, the greater the chance that animals will become ill. And the more animals you have in your population, the more animals your staff will have to care for and the higher the costs. And so it snows. So the idea of Capacity for Care is understanding: what is your actual capacity? If you have 100 kennels, what is the right number of animals to have in those kennels to properly care for them? Again, I see it as a tool.
Because we’re not here and we don’t know and we don’t understand, I think we as an organization could have done so much better in communicating to the community what we were doing and why we were doing it. That was such a missing piece, and I think it’s a real shame because it caused a lot of hurt feelings. This is such an animal-loving community, and we are supported by the community, and it was a shame not to include the community in what we were doing.
So I guess, in terms of my opinion, my opinion is that I want to know more about Santa Fe. I want to talk and understand the situation better. I also want the recommendations of the task forces, but ultimately we have to communicate. We need to make sure that you know what we’re doing, that the community understands that this is what we do, this is why we do it, and this is what we need help with.
Q: How do you plan to strengthen communication and cooperation between the shelter and the local community?
Answer: We’re going to have coffee and connect, and we’re going to talk about cocktails and connect. So we’ll have some morning times and some late afternoon happy hour times. And the idea is to just drop by and have a conversation. I want to make myself as available as possible. It’s on the calendar and we share it on social media. We start next week; We are at Iconik on Tuesday.
Q: Finally, what do you hope your legacy will be as CEO of the Santa Fe Animal Shelter?
Answer: I want us to get to a point where we are not at capacity and we have the capacity to help in a natural disaster; that we have the capacity to help Florida animals in need of help; that we set the standard for animal welfare in this part of the country; that we offer training here for other shelters and shelter leaders; where we have vets who want to come and work here and learn from the staff here. That’s the vision, and that would be really amazing to me.
