A community meeting held the evening of Dec. 23 was successful in electing a new board of directors for the Humane Society Yukon and planning for the future of its animal shelter.

“It went really well,” Carol Oberg, a society director, told the Star last week.

“There is a whole new board of directors: eight people are on it, and it seems really vibrant, a really good board with lots of expertise and lots of energy.”

In early November, the society announced the Mae Bachur Animal Shelter was at risk of closing due to thousands of dollars owed in veterinary bills and 10 animals desperately in need of vet attention.

A bookkeeper was engaged to correct errors made in data entry for the previous two years and to assess the financial state of the shelter, and a call for assistance from the public was made.

Oberg said the community came forward to support the shelter and a meeting on Nov. 26 gave the Tlingit Street facility hope of a new life.

“We couldn’t have survived the way we were going, so we appealed to the community for help and they came out, they volunteered, they said they would be board members,” Oberg said.

As of the meeting on Nov. 26, an outpouring of donations totalled more than $48,000 and assisted the shelter in paying some of the outstanding vet bills.

“The community really came together, and it was a wonderful experience to see that – like phoenix rising,” Oberg said.

The new board includes Deborah Howe as president; Christie Harper as vice-president; Stacy Mitro as secretary; and Cory Adams as treasurer. The directors include Oberg, Jacqui Connoly, Michael Lydon and Morris Prokop.

Oberg is the only member of the board who remains from the previous roster.

She said a collective push of funding from community fundraising and government support has helped alleviate the veterinary bills and engage a bookkeeper and an accountant to right the shelter’s finances.

“We’re not out of the woods yet, but we’ve come a long way,” Oberg said.

“We have to make some economy somehow, and we have to do things in a good way going forward.”

One of the first orders of business for the new board will be to brainstorm how to economize the shelter’s spending.

Oberg suggested there might be some opportunity to find duplication in veterinary costs, for instance when providing vaccinations to animals.

There also might be reason to send dogs and cats to a different shelter if they can’t be provided with a home right away, to alleviate the costs of animals living in the shelter for long periods of time.

“We just have to streamline, and make sure things are going really well,” she said.

“We don’t want to lose any of the care or any of the things we do, but we want to be smarter about it.”

Oberg said she’s confident the new board has the expertise and can-do attitude to turn the shelter around, though “a big job” is ahead with more fundraising to do.

“We all have to work together to make these NGOs really successful–– they’re part of our community and so needed.”

The society was resurrected in the late 1980s after a public outcry about horses starving on an outfitter’s land in the Whitehorse area.

Volunteers cleared off garbage and brush from a parcel of land on Tlingit Street in 1998, and the shelter was built and opened in November of that year.