>> Narrator: From Seattle, Washington
it's the CUBE covering AWS Imagine non-profit.
Brought to you by Amazon web services.
>> Hey welcome back everybody,
Jeff Frick here with the CUBE.
We're on the waterfront in Seattle,
it's an absolutely gorgeous couple of days
here at the AWS Imagine Nonprofit Conference.
We went to the AWS Imagine Education Conference,
this is really all about nonprofits
and we're hearing all kinds of interesting stories
about how these people are using AWS to help
conquer really big problems.
We're going to shift gears a little bit from
the two footed problems to the four footed problems
and that's animals and everybody likes animals
but nobody likes animal shelters
and nobody likes the ultimate solution
that many animal shelters used to use
to take care of problems.
But thank you to our next guest,
that is not quite the case so much anymore.
So we're really happy to have Angie Embree on.
She is the CIO of Best Friends Animal Society,
Angie great to see you.
>> It's great to see you as well
and thank you for having me.
>> Oh absolutely! So before we got on
I just heard this crazy, crazy statistic
that when your organization started in 1984
approximately 17 million animals
were killed in US shelters per year.
That number is now down to 700 thousand,
that is a giant, giant reduction.
And yet you, with big audacious goals
really are looking to get that to zero.
So, that's a giant goal, give us a little bit
of background on the organization
and how you decided to go after a goal like that
and some of the ways you are actually going to achieve it.
>> Well, the organization started in 1984
and it started with a group of friends in Southern Utah
who decided that, you know the killing
in America's shelters just had to go.
So really the Best Friends founders
started the no-kill movement along with a gentleman
in San Francisco by the name of Rich Avanzino.
And as you said, they took you know the killing down
from 17 million in 1984
to approximately 733 thousand now.
The organization started as just the sanctuary,
we have the largest no-kill companion
animal sanctuary in the country
where we hold about 17 hundred animals every day.
And we also have, you know, knowing that we needed to
help out the rest of the country
we have built life saving centers in Houston, Texas.
Or we're working on Houston, Texas but
Los Angels, California, New York City, Salt Lake City,
Atlanta, Georgia, it seems like I've left somebody out but,
>> Probably, but that's okay.
>> We have life saving centers all over the country.
So it was really, you know, when they realized
what was going on in America's shelters
it was really the idea that
we should not be killing animals for space.
So, just recently in fact, I will say recently
but in the last few years, Julie Castle our CEO
put kind of, did our moon shot, put that stake
in the ground and said we're going to take this country
no-kill by the year 2025.
>> Right.
>> So it's super exciting.
>> So it's really interesting because you guys
are trying to execute your vision,
and it's easy to execute your own vision,
but it's a whole different thing when you're trying
to execute your vision through this huge infrastructure
of shelters that have been around forever.
So, I wonder if you can explain kind of
what's your relationship with shelters that you don't own.
I guess, I think you said before we turned on the cameras
there are affiliates, so how does that relationship work?
How do you help them achieve your goal which is no-kill.
>> Yeah, so we have over 27 hundred
network partners around the country.
And what we do is we help to educate them on,
you know we understand their problems,
we have creative programs to solve those problems.
So we help to educate them on, you know, how they can
implement these programs within their shelters.
We provide them grant funding, we have an annual conference
every year where they can come and learn.
But they're really our partners and you know
we know we can't do it alone.
It's going to take us, it's going to take them
and it's going to take everybody in every community
to really step up and help solve the problem.
>> Right, and what was the biggest thing that changed
in terms of kind of attitude in terms of the way
they operate the shelter because I think you said
before that a lot of the killing was done to make room.
>> Right, killing is done usually for space.
>> So what do they do know?
Clearly the space demands probably haven't changed
so what are they doing alternatively where before
they would put the animal down?
>> Well alternatively we're doing transport programs.
So there are areas in the country
that actually have a demand for animals.
So instead of killing the animals, we put them on
some sort of transport vehicle and we take them
to the areas that are in demand.
We also do what's called a trap-neuter-return program.
So one of the biggest problems across the country
are community cats so those, a lot of people
call them feral cats but they're community cats
and usually have a caretaker.
But what we do is we trap those cats,
we take them into the shelter,
we neuter them and vaccinate them
and then return them to their home.
That keeps them from making a lot of other little cats.
>> Making babies (laughs)
>> So yeah, cat's are one of the biggest problems in shelters
today because of the community cats, they're feral cats
and they're not adoptable.
So if we can, we don't have to kill them.
We can, you know, we can keep them from reproducing
as I said and then we can put them back in their habitat
where they live a long healthy life, happy life.
>> Right, so you said you've joined the organization
5 years ago, 5 and 1/2 years ago and you're the CIO,
first ever CIO.
>> I am (laughs)
>> What brought you here and then now that you're here
with kind of a CIO hat, what are some of the new perspective
that you can bring to the organization
that didn't necessarily, that they had had before
from kind of a technical perspective?
>> Well, what brought me here was,
I never expected to be here, if you would have told me
I would be the CIO at Best Friends Animal Society
you know 10 years ago I would have said you're kidding
because I didn't really realize that there were
professional positions in organizations like Best Friends.
But I, you know, my journey begins the same as,
began the same as a lot of peoples did.
I was that little kid always bringing home animals
and you know my mother hated it.
You know it was always something showing up
at our doorstep with me, you know.
And I just loved animals all my life
and as I went through college and got my degree
and started my professional career, then I thought
well I'm going to of course have animals
because I can have as many as I want now, right! (laughs)
So I started adopting, and I didn't even realize
until I was in my 30s that they were killing in shelters
and I learned that in Houston, Texas when I lived there.
I was working for IBM at the time, and one day a lady
came on the television and she said
they were doing a new segment and she said
we're a no-kill shelter and I thought oh my god
if there are no-kill shelters
then there are kill shelters, right?
>> There must be the other.
>> Yeah so, to make a long story short then
I started not working in animal welfare
but doing more to support the movement and donating.
Adopting from shelters and fostering animals
and then one day I had been to Best Friends
as a visitor vacationing in this beautiful part of Utah.
But I saw the CIO ...
>> Position.
>> position open and I said I'm going for it.
>> Good for you.
>> Yeah.
>> Good for you, so now you're there so what are some of
the things you've implemented from kind of a techy,
you know kind of data perspective
that they didn't have before?
>> Well, they didn't have a lot.
>> They probably didn't have a lot, besides email
and the obvious things.
>> Being the first CIO I don't know that I knew
what I was walking into at the time
because I got to Kanab, and Kanab Utah
where the sanctuary is, is the headquarters.
And Kanab is very infrastructure challenged.
>> (laughs) Infrastructure challenged, I like that.
>> There is one ISP in Kanab and there is no redundancy
in networks so we really don't have, you know,
you come from the city and you think,
you take these things for granted and you find out
oh my god, what am I going to do?
And Kanab is you know the hub of our network,
so if Kanab goes down, you know the whole organization
is down so one of the first decisions I made
was that we were going to the cloud.
>> Right, right.
>> Because we had to get Kanab out of that position
and that was one of our, one of the first major
decisions I made and we chose AWS as our partner
to do that so that was very very exciting.
We knew that they had infrastructure
we couldn't dream of providing.
>> Right, right.
>> And, you know we could really make
our whole network more robust, our applications
would be available and we could really do some great things.
>> You're not worried about the one ISP provider
in Kanab because of an accident
that knocks a phone pole down.
>> Yeah, yeah.
>> All right but then you're talking about
some new things that you're working on
and a new thing you talked about
before we turned the cameras on
community lifesaving dashboards, what is that all about?
>> Okay, so a couple of years ago
the community lifesaving dashboard is the
culmination of two years of work.
From all across the Best Friends organization
not just the IT department, in fact it was the brainchild
of our Chief Mission Officer Holly Sizemore.
But it's really, in animal welfare
there's never been a national picture
of what the problem really is
regarding killing animals in shelters.
So we did this big.
>> Because they're all regional right?
They're all regional shelters, very local.
>> They're all local community shelters, yes.
And transparency isn't forced, so you know
some states force transparency,
they reinforce in the report numbers
but a lot of states don't.
>> At the state level.
>> Yeah, a lot of states don't, so.
You know when you're killing animals in shelters
you really don't want people to know that.
>> Yeah, yeah it's not something you want to advertise.
>> Because the American public doesn't believe in it.
So anyway we worked really hard to collect
all this data from across the country
and we put it all into this dashboard
and it is now a tool where anybody in the public,
it's on our website, can look at it
and they can see that where we're at from a national level.
They can see where they're at from a state level,
they can drill down into their community
and they can drill down to an individual shelter.
>> Wow.
>> And the idea behind the dashboard is to really,
is to get communities behind helping their shelters.
Because as I said earlier, it's going to take us all.
>> Right.
>> And not only Best Friends and our partners
but the public plays a big part of this.
>> Right, and so when did that roll out?
Do you have any kind of feedback, how's it working?
>> It's working wonderfully, we rolled it out
at our conference in July.
>> So recently, so it's a pretty new initiative.
>> Yeah it's just a few weeks old.
>> Okay.
>> We rolled it out at our national conference
and we were all a bit nervous about it, you know
especially from a technology perspective.
>> Right, right.
>> We knew that being the first of it's kind ever
in animal welfare that you know it was going to get
a lot of publicity both inside and outside the movement.
>> (laughs) How you want to say both pro and con.
>> Yeah, and it's sitting on our website,
well really pro and con.
>> Right, right.
>> But it's sitting on our website and we're like okay,
we don't know what kind of traffic we're going to get,
you know what are we going to do about this?
So we spent a lot of time with Amazon
prior to the launch, you know having them look
at our environment and getting advice,
discussing it with them.
>> Not going to bring down that ISP in Utah.
>> No, thank god! (laughs)
>> (laughs)
>> No it wasn't, thank god we were in the cloud.
So Amazon really helped us prepare and then
the day of the launch, we knew the time of the launch.
So we actually had a war room set up, a virtual war room
and we had Amazon employees participating in our war room.
We watched the traffic
and we did get huge spikes in traffic
at all times through the day
when certain things were happening.
And I'm happy to say from a technology perspective
it was a non-event because we did not crash
we stayed up, we handled all the traffic,
we scaled when we needed to, and we did it you know,
virtually at the press of a button.
>> Awesome.
>> Or the flick of a switch, whatever you want to say.
>> That's what you want right?
>> Yeah, exactly.
>> You just don't want anyone to know,
I was like give a good ref, nobody's talking about you
you probably did a good job.
>> Yeah, exactly yeah.
>> Good, so before I let you go
so what are some of your initiatives now looking forward.
You've got this great partner in AWS,
you have basically as much horsepower as you need
to get done what you need to get done.
What are some of the things that you see,
you know kind of next for your roadmap?
>> Well, we have a lot.
>> Don't give me the whole list (laughs)
>> No I'm just going to hit on a few key points.
I think, you know we used Amazon initially
as our cloud infrastructure but I think
the biggest thing we're looking at
is platform as a service.
There is so much capability out there
with predictive analytics, machine learning,
artificial intelligence, ARVR, you name it
facial recognitions, so we're really investigating
those technologies because we think they have
you know they could have a huge impact on our movement
and really help us achieve life saving.
>> Right, right.
>> And, I think that, you know we're starting
we have our fledgling data science program.
We're using the Amazon data lake technology,
Athena, Glue, they were just telling me about
data lake formation which I just a few minutes ago
emailed my data guy and said
start looking at data lake formation.
>> Right, right.
>> So, I mean we're really investing
in the platform as a service.
The other thing I see is that we're,
animal welfare is sort of broken
from a technology perspective and a data perspective.
In that we have no interoperability
and you know we don't have the data available.
So lets say you want to adopt a 5-year old animal.
Well, you go to a shelter you can't get
5 years of history on a 5 year old animal.
So it's really starting to fix the foundation
for the movement as a whole, not just Best Friends.
So, making sure that you know the veterinary data is there,
all the data from the pet ecosystem is there.
So we're investigating with AWS
they're actually coming to our sanctuary
in a couple of months, we're going to do a workshop
to figure out how we do this, how we really fix it
so that we have interoperability between every shelter
when an animal moves from shelter to rescue or whatever
so that their data follows them wherever they go.
So adopters are fully informed when adopting an animal.
>> Because you're in a pretty interesting position,
because you're not with any one particular shelter
you kind of cross many many boundaries.
So you're in a good position
to be that aggregator of that data.
>> Yeah, I don't know that we want to be the aggregator
but we want to lead the movement towards doing that.
Just getting the technology players,
the shelter management systems,
the other people who play a role in technology
for animal welfare, getting them in a room and talking
and figuring out this problem is huge.
>> Right.
>> And with a partner like Amazon we feel it can be solved.
>> Right. Well Angie thank you for taking a few minutes
and sharing your story, really really enjoyed hearing it.
>> All right thank you so much.
>> All right, she's Angie, I'm Jeff you're watching the CUBE
we're at AWS Imagine in Seattle, thanks for watching
we'll see you next time.
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