Who Actually Funds Animal Shelters? One Shelter's 40 Funders

October 13, 2026·By Brodie Wells

Ask around a shelter or a rescue about grants and you will hear some version of the same sentence: there are no grants for animal groups. Foundations fund kids, health, housing. Animals get bake sales.

We wanted to see whether that holds up against the record, so we looked at one shelter.

What we looked at

We picked an animal shelter in Virginia Beach, not a GrantSnag customer, and pulled every grant to it that shows up in filed foundation tax returns (Forms 990 and 990-PF) from 2019 to 2025. Those returns list each grant a foundation made: who got it, how much, and in what year.

Here is what came back:

40 funders
94 grants
$2.58 million in total

That is one shelter, in one city, from the filings alone. It does not include individual donors, events, or government money.

Most of the funders are not animal funders

If you search a grant database for "animal," you will find the national programs. They are real, and they show up here. PetSmart Charities is the largest funder in this shelter's record by a long way, about half of all the dollars. Grey Muzzle, Petco Love and the ASPCA all appear too.

But they are 8 of the 40. 32 of this shelter's 40 funders have no animal word anywhere in their name. A keyword search would never have shown them to you.

Who are they?

The local community foundation. Hampton Roads Community Foundation is the second-largest funder in the record and gave in five separate years, 2020 through 2024.
Virginia funders in general. 17 of the 40 are Virginia organizations. Together they account for a little over a third of the dollars.
Small family foundations that give every year. Six Virginia funders gave to this shelter in three or more separate years. Five of them are small: together they gave about $26,000 over the period, in checks of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. Two are Virginia Beach family foundations, the kind that rarely tops a national database ranking.
Corporate foundations. Banks, a utility, a health system and retailers, mostly with small gifts.
Giving platforms and donor-advised funds. A few entries are money a donor routed through Fidelity Charitable, PayPal Giving Fund or a similar platform. Those show who your donors are, not a grant program you can apply to.

So is the sentence wrong?

Partly. There are plenty of funders behind a working shelter. The sentence is really about where people look. Keyword searches return the national animal programs, which everyone applies to, and miss the local and family money that is the steadier part of a shelter's funding.

The repeat givers matter more than the big names. A small family foundation that has written a check five years running is telling you something a one-time national grant cannot: it knows the organization and keeps choosing it.

What this record cannot tell you

A tax return says who got money. It does not say:

Whether the funder takes applications. Many small family foundations only give to groups they already know. Some say so on their return; many do not.
Why they gave. A 990-PF lists a purpose line at best. It never shows what the shelter submitted or who made the introduction.
Whether the funder is still active. One of the six repeat Virginia givers reported zero assets on its latest filing, which can mean it is winding down. Check before you write.

That is real research and it is still your job. What the record does is give you the right 40 names to research instead of the wrong 400.

How to do this for your own group

Start from a shelter or rescue like yours, ideally one in your region with a similar budget. Not from a keyword.
Pull its funders from the filings. On GrantSnag that is a peer search; you can try it on the homepage without an account.
Set aside the pass-throughs. Donor-advised funds and giving platforms are not grant programs.
Look for repeat years. Funders that gave in three or more separate years are your best leads.
Look close to home. Your community foundation and the small family foundations in your county are the ones most likely to know your work already.

Then run the same search on a second and third peer. The funders that show up more than once are the ones that fund your kind of work, not just one organization.

There are grants for animal groups. They are mostly not labeled that way.