Animal Victory Disaster & Abuse Fund

Janelle Babington

Founder & Chief Vision Officer

**Animal Victory & Animal Victory Fund**

My Vision

*Creating a world where animals will be respected.*

I’m on a mission: I have an overwhelming desire to stop animal abuse. It’s my calling, and I have the skills to make headway. I’ve got the compassion, the entrepreneur brain, and absolutely zero ability to sit still. I just need the brave souls I’ve collected along the way to stick with me.

I built **Animal Victory** and **Animal Victory Fund** for one purpose: to create a sustainable financial engine so I could give money away to credible, sustainable, boots on the ground organizations doing the hardest work. Rescue. The more funding that becomes available to these organizations, the more animals we can help and the more suffering we can prevent.

I spent more than ten years hands on in rescue. I loved that work. It broke my heart daily, but it taught me how rescue operates, where the gaps exist, and what organizations need to survive. Eventually, I realized my greatest impact wasn’t saving one animal at a time. It was building systems that could support thousands.

When I married my husband in 2012, he supported me and encouraged me to work toward that vision. I was giving so much money away to animal rescues that he finally said, **“If you keep giving all of our money away, we’re going to be in the free cheese line.”**

So I said, **“Well then, I’ll start a business to make the money.”**

I had no idea how I was going to do it, but in 2015, an opportunity came along.

This is how I’m using my skill set now.

**This is the mission I was born for.**

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How It All Started: Cecil the Lion

Animal Victory didn’t start as a business. It didn’t start as a nonprofit. It didn’t even start as a plan.

The idea began in 2015, when Cecil the Lion was killed in Zimbabwe on July 1 by American dentist Walter Palmer.

I remember thinking: *“I want to donate. I want to help. Who is collecting funds for the people doing the real work?”*

I went online, literally just trying to donate $5, and couldn’t find a small organization accepting donations specifically to help address what had happened to Cecil.

Then Jimmy Kimmel went on television and raised $750,000 overnight for the research institute tracking Cecil.

That moment taught me something I’ve never forgotten: **Donating is driven by emotion, not logistics.** People don’t necessarily stop to analyze who is behind the donation link. They see a problem, they feel compassion, and they want to help.

I didn’t even know exactly what a group raising money for Cecil would do with my five dollars. I just knew what happened to him wasn’t right, and I wanted to help in any way I could.

That’s when something clicked for me: **The money exists. The compassion exists. But small rescues don’t have the bridge they need to reach donors.**

That realization changed the direction of my life.

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2015 to 2017: Trial, Error, and Learning the Hard Way

Before anything worked, plenty of things failed.

Between 2015 and 2017, I made nearly every business mistake imaginable while trying to build a platform that could support small, credible rescues. I lost money, restarted multiple times, and burned through ideas that simply didn’t work.

But those years became my education. They taught me how donations flow, how rescues operate, what donors respond to, and what sustainable funding actually requires.

In March 2017, I formed One Red Lion, Inc., a corporation designed to promote rescue causes across the United States, raise awareness, and generate funding. The first model failed. I lacked the experience, infrastructure, and guidance I needed to make it work.

Then another question took hold. What happens to animals when natural disasters strike? Who steps in when shelters flood, power fails, and rescues are overwhelmed?

In July 2017, I founded the **American Red Lion Disaster Fund**, a nonprofit created to build a bridge between donors and local animal welfare organizations facing emergencies. The mission was to move money and supplies quickly to the people on the ground who needed them most.

I had already researched the thousands of struggling rescues across the country that needed more public support. I knew the problem was real. I didn’t yet have every answer, but for the first time, the vision felt achievable.

Then came 2018. Hurricane Florence became my real test.

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2018: Hurricane Florence, When It Became Real

I was living in Wilmington, North Carolina, when Hurricane Florence hit. It was my first hurricane, and the media was urging people to leave.

Small rescues were crying for help:

• No transportation

• No crates or carriers

• No fuel

• No emergency supplies

• Overwhelmed shelters

People were bringing animals to shelters because they had nowhere else to take their pets. Other pets were being left behind.

I evacuated to Raleigh through the storm, terrified because I couldn’t stop thinking about the animals still in danger.

From a family member’s house, surrounded by chaos and uncertainty, I began fundraising through my nonprofit in real time. Donations started coming in, and as soon as funds cleared the bank, I sent them out. Rescues and animals didn’t have time to wait.

I saw firsthand what organizations needed: generators, crates and carriers, fencing, tarps, medicine, and transportation vehicles.

One bird rescue was evacuating 40 parrots in two tiny cars because it didn’t have a van. That moment has stayed with me ever since.

**Those days in Florence, fleeing a hurricane while fundraising for it, cemented my disaster relief mission.** I had seen the problem firsthand, and I knew that getting resources to credible local organizations quickly could make a real difference.

### The Impact of American Red Lion Disaster Fund

With a small group of volunteers, we assisted rescues during Hurricane Florence, Hurricane Michael, the California Camp Fire, and other emergencies. The organization received recognition from GreatNonprofits and GuideStar, and rescues began relying on us for support.

Those experiences reinforced a fundamental truth: massive disasters create more need than any single organization can meet. Local rescues are often the first to respond, yet many lack the money, supplies, and transportation needed to do their work.

Our mission was to identify credible, hands on animal welfare organizations and get them the funds and supplies they needed as quickly as possible.

I also learned that compassion and hard work aren’t enough. Organizations need visibility, funding, and sustainable infrastructure to continue operating.

The American Red Lion Disaster Fund ceased operations in 2020. Without the resources and team needed to grow it sustainably, I had to rethink how I could continue pursuing the same mission.

I wasn’t giving up on the animals. I was looking for a better way to help them.

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Animal Victory: Building a Sustainable Platform

In April 2019, my good friend Penny Eims and I decided to combine our strengths after years of frustration over the lack of meaningful help available for abused and neglected animals.

Penny had worked as a journalist for more than a decade, writing investigative animal abuse stories that raised public awareness and gave a voice to victims who could not speak for themselves. I brought operational structure, strategic planning, business development, and a long term vision for generating sustainable support for animal welfare.

Together, we studied the online advocacy landscape. We saw people creating petitions about animal abuse, but there was an opportunity to do more: sustain public pressure, follow cases, demand accountability, and support the organizations caring for the animals involved.

We set out to build something different.

**Animal Victory became a national petition and advocacy platform designed to:**

• Expose animal abuse and neglect

• Mobilize large scale public support

• Bring media attention to cases

• Pressure authorities to pursue accountability

• Help generate support for small, credible rescues working on the front lines

Animal Victory became more than a petition platform. Our goal was to ensure that cases were not simply seen and forgotten, but pursued and followed through.

Since 2019, Animal Victory has also donated nearly $60,000 in food and supplies to small organizations and individuals, in addition to its petition and advocacy work.

Building Animal Victory taught me that advocacy and charitable support serve different but complementary purposes. Public pressure can demand accountability, while direct assistance helps the people doing the daily work of rescuing and caring for animals.

I wanted to bring those efforts together without losing sight of what each organization was designed to do.

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The Birth of Animal Victory Disaster & Abuse Fund

As Animal Victory grew, supporters began asking two important questions:

*“Can we donate tax deductibly?”*

*“Can you help animals during disasters?”*

I already had years of disaster relief experience. I had lived through Hurricane Florence and built a nonprofit around getting resources to rescues in crisis.

That experience led me to establish the **Animal Victory Disaster & Abuse Fund**, an affiliated 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to helping animals and supporting the people who care for them.

Its work includes:

• Providing emergency funding and supplies during disasters

• Supporting shelters and local rescues

• Helping people experiencing homelessness care for their pets

• Funding low cost spay and neuter assistance

• Filling gaps that leave animals without the help they need

To launch the nonprofit responsibly and maintain its stability, we relied on infrastructure already built for Animal Victory. The for profit initially covered much of the overhead, and the two organizations share resources and certain administrative costs where appropriate and efficient.

The organizations have distinct roles. **Animal Victory drives advocacy and public pressure. Animal Victory Fund provides charitable assistance and disaster relief.** Together, they help address both the demand for accountability and the practical needs of animals in crisis.

The central belief behind both organizations remains the same: small rescues do some of the hardest work in animal welfare, yet too often struggle to obtain the resources they need.

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How Funding Really Works and Why the System Fails Animals

As I continued researching, I became increasingly concerned about how little visibility and funding animal welfare receives compared with the scale of the problem.

Animals are grouped with environmental causes in Giving USA's charitable giving categories rather than receiving a separate category of their own. This makes it harder to understand the full picture of charitable giving to animals as a distinct cause.

Giving USA reported that Americans donated approximately $592 billion to charity in 2024, with about 7.7% going to the combined Animals & Environment category.

But that combined figure doesn't tell us how much went specifically to animals, how much went to environmental causes, or how the money was distributed among organizations.

What I have seen firsthand is that **the majority of animal related donations go to a relatively small number of large, well known organizations**, while thousands of smaller rescues, shelters, sanctuaries, wildlife rehabilitators, and spay and neuter programs struggle to secure enough funding to continue their work.

These smaller organizations are often the ones:

• Pulling animals from cruelty cases

• Bottle feeding newborns

• Rescuing animals during disasters

• Treating abused and abandoned animals

• Saying yes to the animals nobody else wants

Many have the passion, experience, and manpower. What they lack is reliable funding.

Over the past several years