When Dr. Mariah Dee applied for the Maddie’s Million Pet Challenge Shelter Consultation Mentorship Program, she didn’t expect it to reshape her entire career. A fourth-year veterinary student with a background in outbreak response, Dr. Dee was already passionate about animal welfare, but the mentorship helped her channel that passion into leadership.
Designed for veterinarians and shelter professionals ready to expand their skills, the Shelter Consultation Mentorship Program provides hands-on experience in assessing shelters, building strategic plans, and leading change. For Dr. Dee, it was the foundation for the work she’s doing now at the Humane Society of Tennessee Valley.
The Maddie’s Million Pet Challenge Shelter Consultation Mentorship Program
The mentorship program begins with a course of self-study and assigned readings. After completing the course, trainees are welcome to apply for one of the limited number of spots in an in-person mentorship, in which they will join a team of national experts and participate in a real-world assessment for a shelter client.
Mentees can include shelter medicine interns, residents, shelter managers, veterinarians, veterinary students, and animal welfare professionals from national organizations.
Dr. Dee originally discovered the mentorship program through a personal outreach to Dr. Sara Pizano, one of the program’s lead mentors.
“I was at a pivotal point in my time as a vet student,” Dr. Dee said. “I was a USDA fellow at the time, going through an internship program focused on zoonotic disease outbreaks in large animals and cattle. But I had a couple of keystone experiences with the University of Tennessee Shelter Medicine program that made me recognize what a need there was for animal welfare veterinarians, especially in East Tennessee.”
Dr. Dee wasn’t sure what to do to help, but the podcast with Dr. Pizano gave her a focus. “Being young and plucky, I sent her an email asking how to help shelters,” she said. Dr. Pizano suggested the mentorship program.
The program had a shelter consultation lined up in Sumner County, TN, and Dr. Dee joined Dr. Pizano and UF’s Cameron Moore on the team.
“I got to see in action how they would go room by room, person by person, and ask a lot of really good questions,” she said. “They already know what the best practices are because at this point, this had been their hundredth-plus consult that they’d done. They can say, ‘Here’s this problem. Here’s the solution.’ And they do it in a compassionate way that acknowledges all the hard work the shelter personnel had been doing up until that point, while also saying, ‘Hey, there’s a better way of doing this.’”
Dr. Dee was also impressed at the impact of the consultation to increase the lifesaving potential of the organization. “Dr. Pizano and Cameron don’t just focus on the shelter, but also think about stakeholders and the community.”
Applying the Mentorship Lessons in Real Time
After the Sumner County consultation was completed, Dr. Dee accepted a position as medical director at the Humane Society of Tennessee Valley in Knoxville. But the opportunity to put her mentorship experience to the test came before she even started in her new role, when distemper broke out at the Young-Williams Animal Center, also in Knoxville.
Dr. Dee had joined Cameron and Dr. Pizano for a consult at Young-Williams, and on the very last day they received confirmation of the distemper outbreak. Dr. Dee was able to help YWAC as a contract veterinarian collecting swabs, sorting positive dogs from exposed, and collaborating with Dr. Cynda Crawford at the UF Shelter Medicine Program. Together they helped Young-Williams manage the outbreak.
She then moved on to her new position at HSTV in July of 2024. At the time they had been without a veterinarian on staff for three or four years. The surgical suite was being used for storage, and binders with SOPs and other information were gathering dust.
None of that got Dr. Dee down. “I was really energized to make an impact there,” she said. She first focused on updating operations and housing to be more closely aligned with Association of Shelter Veterinarians guidelines. She also looked at re-opening the shelter’s community veterinary clinic to offer low-cost wellness care to members of the public.
“It’s one of my big goals is to get that back up and running,” she said. “But we’ve been focusing on tidying up our house first and making sure the shelter is optimized, and then focusing on what can we do for additional outreach.”
Mentorship as a Launchpad for Leadership
Shortly after Dr. Dee started at the shelter, the organization experienced a change of leadership and was without an executive director for two months. Putting the lessons she’d learned during her mentorship to use, Dr. Dee stepped into a leadership role. She helped guide the board in its search for a new director, and used the mentorship template to write a report that would help the next director understand the shelter and its priorities.
“With the board’s approval, I critically thought about the shelter as a whole, and then broke it up into its individual parts and tried to mimic what Cameron and Dr. Pizano do,” she said. “I used what I learned in the consults and put it to good use here at HSTV.”
And put it to good use she certainly did. Their surgery suite is back up and running, all anesthesia equipment has been serviced, and the veterinary team has received advanced training.
The changes aren’t just in the surgery suite. “We started with the intake process and moved department by department trying to achieve the shortest length of stay possible, increasing the efficiency of pets moving through the system, removing barriers to adoption, and making sure on the veterinary side that we have everything we need to do surgeries efficiently so there isn’t a bottleneck.”
The new executive director, Ryan Hughes, utilized Dr. Dee’s report as a guide to have critical conversations with staff members. And later this month, the board is having a vision meeting to help guide the future of the shelter, at which Dr. Dee will be a key player.
“I would not know half of what I’m doing without the guidance of that consultation and going through the mentorship program,” Dr. Dee said. “I still, on a near weekly basis, will touch base with Cameron Moore to make sure that I’m thinking about things the right way, and that ultimately everybody’s on the same page and wanting to save as many lives as possible.”
Learn more about the Maddie’s Million Pet Challenge Mentorship Program here.