Catching up with: Aaron Winters, executive director of the Kalamazoo Humane Society
Filed under Society in 2010 |29 Apr
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Mark Bugnaski | Kalamazoo Gazette Animal welfare: Aaron Winters, executive director of the Kalamazoo Humane Society, poses with Trigger, a male lab-mix at the society’s office in Kalamazoo. KALAMAZOO — Aaron Winters has seen his job as executive director of the Kalamazoo Humane Society change significantly over the 23 years he’s held the position.
Winters said that when he joined the not-for-profit organization in 1987, his staff consisted of a receptionist.
“I often answered the phone, followed up on cruelty reports, prepared lost and found reports, conducted all of the education programs, wrote the newsletter, managed the volunteers and did all the fund raising activities,” Winters said.
But now he has 11 staff members and nearly 200 volunteers, which means he’s able to focus on program development, collaboration with other businesses and animal organizations, fund development and fundraising events.
One of the projects Winters said he’s most excited about is working with Kalamazoo County’s Animal Services department to plan a new animal shelter that both organizations will use.
“Our organizations regularly share information and assist one another in numerous animal welfare activities, so it would make sense to work together under one roof,” he said.
The 1983 Michigan State University graduate holds a bachelor’s degree in Social Science–Criminal Justice, and was born in Ann Arbor in 1961.
Book on his nightstand?
“The Conspiracy Club,” by Jonathan Kellerman.
Who gave you the topper slice of sprightliness advice and what was it?
“My parents. When I was a young stripling, they aforementioned, ‘Do your better and do what is veracious, no affair what your friends guess.’ I try to survey that advice. I look if it’s deserving doing in the outset post, consecrate it your all. If it’s the rightfulness matter to do, evening if it is not pop with approximately multitude, do it anyhow. At the end of the day, if I’ve through my better and toughened myself and others the rectify way, it’s been a commodity day.”
What’s your biggest achiever?
“My biggest winner is beingness marital 25 years to Cathy, a fantastic womanhood and fauna devotee who has damned me with deuce-ace marvellous children — Matthew, 23, Rachel, 22, and Caleigh, 9. Cathy I and offset met during our commencement year in college and so again 4 years late at the Capital Area Humane Society in Lansing on my low day at sour.”
Tell us something approximately your formation that would storm mass?
“Two items occur to judgment. First, that the Kalamazoo Humane Society was founded 113 years ago, in 1897. Secondly, that the Kalamazoo Humane Society hasn’t operated an creature protection since 1979. As a non-sheltering humanist gild, it has full-grown from a two-employee administration with an $80,000 budget to one with 11 employees and a $700,000+ budget, mostly due to our community’s dedication to pet universe ascendance and humanistic training programs intentional to assistance micturate our community safer and more pity.”
What’s the biggest gainsay your constitution faces?
“Our biggest dispute is a deficiency of spa. The low-priced castrate/castrate services we pass are preventing myriad litters of undesirable kittens and puppies, but we could do so practically more with a bigger operative installation and tolerable distance for volunteers and visitors. It’s hard to living up with the ask for castrate/sexless surgeries. By collaborating with Kalamazoo County Animal Services and Enforcement to body-build a new brute attention & resourcefulness centerfield, we testament be capable to execute many more surgeries and keep many more undesirable litters. We’ll fingerroot challenged families admission our supportive services — such as our pet nutrient deposit — and reaching more mass in motive of our authoritative humanistic breeding messages and services.”
If you could suffer dejeuner with any renowned someone who would it be and why?
“Abraham Lincoln. In improver to his many former admirable qualities, I admire his perseveration. He was a man who ne’er foreswear nerve-wracking. Even aft respective failures in government, his pertinacity led him to get a big prexy of our land.”
Know somebody who we should visibility? Send suggestions and liaison info to Sunday Business editor Alex Nixon at anixon@kalamazoogazette.com.
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