PVMA Keystone Veterinarian Summer 2020 - 21

Animal Care PA and
PetSmart Charities
Connect Veterinarians
and Seniors
®

By Doctors Malcolm Kram, George Melillo,
Susan Ackerman, Deborah Landis and James Orsini

You may have missed it but your
Pennsylvania Veterinary Foundation
(PVF) was renamed and rebranded as
Animal Care PA (ACPA) in 2019. The
name may have changed, but what
we do has not. We connect our PVMA
Members with people and the pets they
love and care for to ensure the best
possible quality of life.
Historically, and thanks to the leadership of Dr. Tom Garg and
Senator Andrew Dinniman and his wife, Margo, Henry's Helping
Paws Program (HHPP) was created as a food program for pets
whose owners could not ensure that they could afford the
cost of food for their dog and/or cat and frequently shared
their own meals with their pet. Right from its start in 2016,
ACPA partnered with Meals on Wheels (MOW) to create the
pilot HHPP, Keeping Pets and Their People Together, a model
for delivering pet food to seniors and serviced by MOW. This
initial program was directed at seniors who were homebound.
It then broadened the outreach to include the senior centers in
Phoenixville, West Chester, and Coatesville in Chester County,
Pennsylvania.
The pilot program in delivering pet food and people food by
MOW was highly successful, but there was something missing -
if seniors were unable to feed their pet, how could they provide
their pet with basic health care to parallel better nutrition? Your
ACPA board had the solution - let's take preventive veterinary
care to owners who are homebound or to their local senior

center, 6-feet apart of course. The
challenge, of course, was how do we
fund such a program? Unfortunately,
ACPA's coffers could not support this
program without significant aid. Our
Board chair at that time, Dr. Malcolm
Kram, and Board member, Steve
Shell, utilized a mutual connection
with PetSmart Charities®' CEO, who
recognized the importance and value
of the ACPA mission and, in particular, HHPP. PetSmart Charities
generously supported the program with not one, but two
consecutive grants to develop and test a model that could be
expanded to the rest of the Commonwealth and, if successful,
become a branded program for the rest of the country.
The Henry's Helping Paws Program, which is our FEED initiative,
is just one of three life-changing programs administered
by ACPA, along with the other two programs: CARE and
EDUCATE. HHPP's innovative program remains focused on the
Commonwealth's senior population who own pets but whose
annual incomes do not support the cost of feeding and caring
for this vital family member. We have the food part of the
program well organized and are now able to deliver pet food
directly to the homes of seniors who are homebound, but we
want to validate the primary care arm of the program. Share the
Love, a one-day healthcare event, was held at the Phoenixville
Senior Center in April 2018, attended by seniors and their pets.
It was very labor intensive and expensive to run but a very
positive experience with a team of veterinarians, veterinary
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Pennsylvania Veterinary Medical Association | 21
PVMA Keystone Veterinarian Summer 2020

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