IMHS: About Us

Intermountain Humane Society was first incorporated in 1982. This “grass-roots” organization arose from a community response to the closure of Park County’s Animal Control Department in 1981. Greg and M.C. Johnson were the driving force behind this effort to provide some means of dealing with animal issues in the county which, at that time, had neither a shelter nor animal control officers.

From 1982 until 2002, IMHS operated solely as a rescue organization. There was no permanent shelter facility, so foster homes and a local vet clinic were used to house and care for homeless pets. In 2002 IMHS opened a small shelter facility (our current location in Pine Junction). In addition, we continue to provide foster homes for many of our resident animals.

IMHS’s service area of Park County and southwest Jefferson County, Colorado encompasses 2,300 square miles, yet our efforts to promote the human-animal bond reaches much farther. Certainly, we provide shelter and assistance to homeless pets in our local area. We also network with metro Denver and other Colorado shelters, taking in transfers when we have available space. Since late 2008, IMHS has participated in rescue efforts in Kansas and New Mexico, taking homeless pets out of desperate situations and bringing them in to the IMHS shelter. Our adopters aren’t geographically limited, either: thanks to the internet, IMHS shelter pets go to their forever homes in Colorado Springs and Cheyenne as often they do to Bailey and Pine.

Throughout our existence, Intermountain Humane Society has depended entirely upon voluntary donations made by individuals and businesses in the communities we serve; we also benefit from grant monies and donations from philanthropic foundations. Unlike other shelters in our area, IMHS receives no governmental support.

The majority of veterinary services for IMHS residents are donated and/or provided at nominal cost. A paid staff of four, an all-volunteer Board of Directors and a group of dedicated volunteers offer the administrative and technical expertise needed to protect and improve the lives of animals in our care.

Thank you for the information and glad to have you here.

I understand there have been some recent changes. Could you expand on that and tell us what you will be doing to improve things?

Hi,

My name is Steve Kelsey and I am the new IMHS president. With the turnover with the BoD in the last month, to be truthful, we have been scrambling a bit to handle all of the day-to-day operational issues with as few interruptions as possible. This has been our primary focus in the last 3 weeks. We do have some longer term plans which we will be addressing as the transition smooths out. Our main goals, today, focus on financials and communications. Here are some of our current projects:

1) Getting members involved to help with fundraising and grant writing. We have a volunteer who is working on grants and several who are beginning to get involved with fundraising. As you can all imagine, we cannot do our work without the funds to continue operations. With the economy in the last few years, grants and donations are down. We rely on grants and donations to care for the critters. We are also working to fill the remaining board positions and have had quite a bit of interest from members of the community.

2) Opening new channels of communication to the community. The staff has done a great job with getting IMHS onto facebook ( http://www.facebook.com/pages/Intermoun ... 3491762376 ) and starting a blog ( http://shelterpets.imhs.org/ ). Please link to and visit these wonderful sites. In addition, we have worked with Science Chick and 285Bound to get this forum up and running. We also have ongoing efforts in a few other areas. The first being more information available on our website. We are still working on details but will have more news and communications there. We are also working to better organize our data so that we can keep in contact with our volunteers and members more easily.

There are, of course, other areas we are pursuing.

1) We will be forming a committee to help with technology. This serves to help a great deal not only for with #2 above, but will also help the staff be more efficient and effective.

2) We will be looking to get more volunteers involved. More volunteers will allow the staff to focus on the running of the shelter and the implementation of future goals. There are lots of great opportunities for the community to be involved with IMHS. If you can offer a few hours a month of your time we have many simple tasks that would benefit the animals. We need dog walkers. We need people to spend a few minutes brushing and loving our cats and kittens. The thrift store ( http://imhs.org/second_chance.html ) can always use donations... of time, items or even just a few minutes to browse the wonderful selection of items! We need people who are willing to spend a few hours transporting animals to and from our partners. We can even supply the transportation in our new (to us) IMHS van. Note that you can fill out a volunteer application by following the link under applications at our website ( http://imhs.org/ ) and someone from IMHS will contact you to get you into the mix.

3) We are working to get more local veterinarians working with us to provide more in-house care and services (ideally we would like to see spay/neuters be performed in house)

I encourage anyone to contact me at if there is anything I can do to help you or if you have questions I can answer. I also encourage you to join us for our monthly board meetings (6:30pm on the 3rd Thusday of each month at the Fire Station located at Richmond Hill Rd. and highway 285). Also, keep an eye out here and on our website for the latest news and information.

Regards,

-Steve

Thanks Neighbor!

Thanks for all you guys are doing to rescue our precious animals that have fallen on some hard times.
I will hopefully be back home in December and would love to offer my time to helping with whatever you guys need.

I am really happy to see IMHS here and on other sites like Facebook, seems you are working really hard for the animals. Great job.