The small Massachusetts rescue that has placed 2,000 dogs in five years

Doges Editorial · 2026-05-10 · 5 min read

Better Together Dog Rescue in Leverett, Massachusetts started five years ago with three employees and a clear-eyed view of a national crisis. It has since found permanent homes for 2,000 dogs — one at a time, one foster at a time, one walk at a time.

Kayla Blair can identify the exact moment a shelter dog decides it's safe. It's not the first car ride, or the first night in a foster home, or the first morning waking up on a real bed. It's the walk outside. The leash going taut. The first breath of air that isn't kennel air. And then, for some dogs, a kind of visible exhale — the shoulders lowering, the jaw loosening, the whole body recalibrating.

You can see the difference in a lot of dogs' personalities when they are able to leave the kennel and start walking outside. Sometimes you can literally see the stress just come off of them as they step out.

— Kayla Blair, volunteer coordinator, Better Together Dog Rescue

Blair coordinates volunteers at Better Together Dog Rescue in Leverett, Massachusetts — a small organization that, five years in, has placed more than 2,000 dogs in permanent homes. As of this week, 30 more are living in foster homes across western Massachusetts, learning what the world looks like when it isn't a kennel.

A rescue built from a crisis

Jenny Franz founded Better Together in 2021 after what she describes as a clear-eyed look at the national dog homelessness problem. Shelters across the country — particularly in the South — operate under sustained pressure from stray populations that outpace their capacity. Animals are euthanized not because they are unadoptable but because there is nowhere for them to go. Franz saw the gap and decided to work on filling a small piece of it.

The rescue now has three paid employees and a network of volunteers who serve as the connective tissue between dogs in crisis and the homes that take them in. It's a lean operation by design — low overhead, high throughput, driven almost entirely by people who show up because they want to.

I will say we're a small organization. We have three paid employees at minimum wage and we rely heavily on our volunteers and fosters for their time. So it's quite a big accomplishment that we have been able to save and rehome many dogs.

— Jenny Franz, founder, Better Together Dog Rescue

Where the dogs come from

Most of Better Together's dogs start their journey in Texas or Tennessee. Shelters in Cleveland, Texas, and Nashville operate under chronic overcrowding — stray populations large enough that available space runs out long before demand does. Franz sends volunteers south twice a year to do what she calls 'boots on the ground' work: delivering food, supplies, and veterinary care through the Forgotten Animals of Cleveland Texas program.

From there, dogs are transported north to Massachusetts, where they receive veterinary checks and a state-mandated 48-hour isolation period before being released into the foster network. That transition — from a Texas shelter to a living room in Amherst or Northampton or Deerfield — is, Franz says, a shift that volunteers feel every time.

'It's a volunteer-favorite shift because they get to see the journey of these dogs coming through and going into their second chances,' she said.

The arithmetic of fostering

Austin Urkiel and his wife have fostered 22 dogs through Better Together since the rescue opened. They've also adopted two. Most placements last around three weeks, though some are as short as a single day. The experience changed how Urkiel thinks about what a foster parent actually does.

The line is, 'it saves two lives.' It opens a spot up for another dog to be in the shelter while you're holding onto that dog until it finds its forever home.

— Austin Urkiel, Better Together volunteer

The arithmetic of fostering is unglamorous and important. Every dog in a foster home is a dog not occupying a kennel space. Every kennel space freed is a space that can now take in another dog who might otherwise have had no option at all. The math accumulates quietly, over months, into thousands of outcomes.

Gerry, and the art of the complicated case

Some of the dogs Better Together takes in require more than patience. Gerry has Megaesophagus — a disorder in which the esophagus lacks the muscle tone to move food normally into the stomach. He eats in a specially designed upright chair that uses gravity to do what his esophagus cannot. The chair is a specific piece of equipment, the care routine a daily commitment.

Gerry came through Better Together anyway. The rescue absorbs dogs that other organizations sometimes can't — animals whose medical complexity means longer placements and more specialized care — because the volunteer network has developed enough shared knowledge to hold them. This is one of the things that grows with a rescue that has been operating long enough to build real institutional memory.

A community that showed up

Franz says the response from Leverett and the broader western Massachusetts community has been something she didn't expect when she opened. The rescue has become, in a few years, part of the regional fabric — present at local breweries, farmers markets, and PetSmart locations, visible enough that people come looking for it when they're ready to adopt or foster.

Better Together also works closely with Veterinary Emergency and Specialty Hospitals in Springfield, West Springfield, and Deerfield to take in local animals — dogs who come through veterinary emergency rooms without an owner able to continue their care. The partnerships keep the intake pipeline open beyond the Texas transport runs.

Five years and 2,000 dogs later

Sydne Didier, who works with Franz to match prospective adopters with available dogs, says the thing that stays with her is the improbability of the whole enterprise — the fact that something this small can mean this much to this many animals.

It's very infrequent in life that you get to be involved with something that is so ultimately positive and really makes you feel like 'maybe I couldn't make a huge difference in life, but I can help this one dog get from a bad situation into a loving caring home,' which is just as good for the people as it is for the dogs.

— Sydne Didier, Better Together volunteer

Two thousand placements in five years is, in one sense, a small fraction of the national problem. It doesn't change the math at the scale of American animal homelessness. But it changes the math entirely for 2,000 dogs, and for the people who took them home, and for the volunteers who walked them outside on their first morning in Massachusetts and watched the stress come off them, one step at a time.

Blair still comes back for that moment — the one she described at the start. The dog stepping out of the kennel door. The first walk that is actually a walk, and not an attempt to make sense of confinement. 'Sometimes you can literally see the stress just come off of them as they step out.' It doesn't take long. It doesn't have to.