Joanne Yohannan sat inside an adoption center on wheels a few months ago, cuddling Harry, a homeless 12-year-old Lhasa Apso mix who looked “so sad, just so depressed” – when a couple arrived and fell in love with him.
“They took Harry home” right from the mobile unit, which was parked that day outside a Brooklyn church, said Yohannan, North Shore Animal League America’s off-site adoption director.
The vehicle is on Big Apple streets, thanks to a partnership forged last year between NSALA, the world’s largest no-kill animal-adopting agency, and the city’s Animal Care and Control, whose goal is to end euthanasia as a means of pet-population control.
Yohannan offered to provide Animal Care and Control with her organization’s 35-foot-long customized motor home so the city could “bring its animals from the shelter environment into communities to showcase them for adoption,” she said.
“If people don’t come to the shelter, the shelter comes to them,” she said.
The joint Partnership for Life program has so far found homes for more than 1,300 homeless cats and dogs rescued by the city since last June, when the unit began rolling to places such as supermarkets, malls and churches.
Yohannan, a Queens mother of two, was nominated for a Liberty Community Medal by NSALA President John Stevenson.
She has adopted animals “my entire life” and currently has a Chihuahua, Spike.
Before joining NSALA, she was shelter director of the Brooklyn ASPCA from 1987 to 1994, when the ASPCA provided city animal control.
“It was a different world,” she said, recalling the heartbreak “of so many animals having to be euthanized” because there weren’t enough people adopting them.