Pima Animal Care Center

 

Karen Hollish

Director of Development and Marketing PACC

SPEAKER SEPTEMBER 20, 2016

 

 

Karen Hollish is the director of development and marketing at Pima Animal Care Center. She was hired in March of 2014 to start a fundraising program for the center. At that time, the shelter took in nearly 24,000 pets each year, and it had a save rate of about 74 percent.

Since then, Karen's one-woman program raised more than $3.2 million to help the shelter, as well as an estimated $1 million in critical in-kind support. The investments Karen has cultivated have filled critical resource shortages. Her efforts have helped reduce the number of animals surrendered to the shelter, and they've helped catapult the organization's save rate to 90 percent in 2015.

Before she caught the animal-welfare bug, Karen was a daily newspaper reporter in the Midwest. When she moved in 2011 to the U.S. Virgin Islands for a reporting job, she volunteered her marketing services (and her spare room for fostering kittens) for the Humane Society of St. Thomas. She realized she loved nothing more than hustling for media coverage to help the shelter's pets. She soon changed career paths and has never looked back.