Why Vanessa Getty Chose the Peninsula Humane Society — and What It Made Possible

When Vanessa Getty decided to found San Francisco Bay Humane Friends in 2005, the organizational structure she chose was not incidental. She placed the program under the umbrella of the Peninsula Humane Society & SPCA—and the choice of partner shaped everything the work could become.

The Peninsula Humane Society is not a typical shelter. Unlike county facilities that often function primarily as triage operations, PHS maintains consistently high adoption rates and does not euthanize adoptable animals. It handles wildlife rescue and rehabilitation alongside domestic animal work. When Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, PHS flew in planeloads of displaced animals from the Gulf Coast, providing care and placement when the need was most acute. It is an organization with the infrastructure, institutional values, and operational capacity to support sustained, expanding work.

Getty recognized that early. The partnership allowed San Francisco Bay Humane Friends to launch its mobile spay-neuter clinic with real institutional backing: veterinary staff, organizational credibility, and a network that extended across the Bay Area. The mobile unit operated under PHS’s umbrella, which meant it could coordinate with shelters, rescue groups, and community organizations in ways a standalone program could not.

The results were tangible and lasting. In neighborhoods served by the mobile clinic, shelter intake declined. The program has now performed more than 9,500 free surgeries, making it the most sustained mobile veterinary outreach effort in the Bay Area and the only program of its kind in the region.

Getty’s board service at PHS, which has continued for nearly two decades, reflects the depth of that partnership. Her involvement has been operational rather than ceremonial—governance, donor cultivation, and organizational strategy alongside the hands-on engagement that has defined her work from the beginning.

The current extension of that partnership is the development of an animal sanctuary in Half Moon Bay—a facility designed to expand the definition of what makes an animal adoptable and to provide long-term care for animals who require it. The project reflects a consistent logic: identify a gap in the existing system and build something to close it.

Getty has also described an awareness that understanding animal welfare means understanding how the system actually functions—from the county shelters that process every stray, to the private rescue groups that often represent an animal’s only chance, to the regional adoption networks where some animals have dramatically better odds than others. The PHS partnership gave her work a home within an organization that understands all of it.

The mobile clinic was the most visible early result of that collaboration. It will not be the last.