Humane Society announces new director

Humane Society of Indianapolis (HSI) announced on Friday the hiring of their new executive director.  Seemingly in keeping with the criticism that has plagued the society for years, this decision is already facing skeptics.

The newly hired director is John Aleshire. He will begin his duties as HSI's head on Sept. 10. Aleshire has years of experience in the non-profit sector, recently as the director of the Little Red Door cancer agency. In a recent interview with Connie Swaim, Aleshire showed the energy and enthusiasm one would expect of a new director, and implored the skeptics to give him a chance to prove himself.

He will indeed need to work hard to prove himself. Having no actual experience in animal welfare, his selection raised many eyebrows, especially after HSI's board president David Horth assured many folks in animal welfare that the new director would be a strong animal person, not a business person, as was the society's last head, Martha Boden.

Aleshire will, in fact, need to overcome many tremendous deficits in public trust accumulated in past years. The operation of the society for the last 5 years under Boden drew frequent and loud criticism of their intensive focus on fundraising, while they all but retreated from reaching out to help the public or other animal welfare groups.

Indeed, activities surrounding the selection of Aleshire have fueled the debate. Several assurances offered by Horth to allay the concerns of animal welfare groups failed to manifest -- the creation of a search committee that would include members of the animal welfare community; the posting of the position and job requirements on the society's web site; assurance that the new director would have strong animal welfare background; and the statement that Boden's departure was largely for budget reasons, while Aleshire will make only slightly less than Boden, and still about $30,000 per year more than the national average of about $60,000 for a very experienced shelter director.

While he has considerable non-profit experience, he has no experience in animal welfare or shelter operations. To some, this has furthered the claims that the focus of the HSI board remains on business to the detriment of the community and the animals. This places an additional burden upon Aleshire to not only try and pilot the society out of financial woes, but to learn how to successfully operate an animal shelter.

As a staunch advocate for bringing No Kill to Indianapolis, Move To Act has offered to bring nationally recognized No Kill sheltering expert Nathan Winograd to HSI to improve their operations. The HSI board has thus far balked at the suggestion, even though it would be at no cost to them. Perhaps Aleshire, on the other hand, will recognize this valuable opportunity to fill in some of the pieces missing from his own expertise.

While all these failings may be those of former head Boden or Horth or the board and not Aleshire's, as the paid director, the burden will fall on Aleshire to clean up these lapses. Critics have continuously slammed HSI's history of making decisions that excluded input from the public, and from animal welfare. These kind of decisions give the appearance of being self-serving, particularly when these decisions have the effect of diminishing services they offer to the public (while the society strives to create new glossy "lifestyle" ad campaigns). Aleshire has assured that he will bring a new era of transparency to operations and decision making at HSI. Time will tell.

Is he the man who can atone for the society's past failings, or is he just the latest in a long string of questionable decisions by the HSI board? There will be many people scrutinizing the actions of the new director. Some will call the scrutiny unfair, but we have to believe that he walked into this position with his eyes open when he accepted the $91,500 salary. Since the deed is now done, we must all hope that he really is the one to make sure that "humane" isn't just a word to HSI.