See Our Impact in Action
Read the United Spay Alliance 2025 Annual Report to see how we’re expanding access to affordable spay/neuter nationwide.
Our Impact
United Spay Alliance
United Spay Alliance (USA) is a national nonprofit 501(c)3 animal welfare organization dedicated exclusively to promoting affordable, accessible, and timely spay/neuter services as the solution to the crisis of cat and dog homelessness.
Spay/neuter. It’s public health for pets.
OUR GOALS:
- Inspire and empower anyone with a passion for spay/neuter to take action in their own communities.
- Provide collaboration and networking opportunities for leaders within the spay/neuter movement, including individual advocates, animal welfare organizations, and veterinary professionals.
- Increase access to affordable spay/neuter services.
- Promote best practices for spay/neuter, including the optimal age to spay/neuter cats and eliminate “kitten season” once and for all.
OUR WORK:
Spay/Neuter Referral Directory
Finding affordable spay/neuter services shouldn’t be hard, but for many pet owners and rescuers, it is. USA maintains a national directory connecting anyone, anywhere, to low-cost spay/neuter providers near them.
In 2025, the directory’s main landing page alone received 56,353 views, making it the most-visted page on our website — and that’s before counting the traffic that flows directly to our individual state pages. Every one of those visits represents someone looking for help.
Find spay/neuter in your community at unitedspayalliance.org/directory.
State Leader Network
Prevention starts with people on the ground. USA’s State Leader Network is the backbone of that local reach: grassroots advocates ready to connect families with affordable spay/neuter services close to home, and – just as importantly – connect with each other.
Advocacy work can be challenging, but State Leaders lean on one another to share strategies and keep the momentum going nationwide.
By the end of 2025, that network reached active State Leaders in 44 states, plus designated leaders for NYC & Long Island and Washington, DC – nearly complete national coverage, with recruitment ongoing to fill the remaining states.
Learn more about the State Leader Network at unitedspayalliance.org/state-leader-network.
Feline Fix by Five
Kittens can go into heat as early as 4 months old. Every month a kitten isn’t sterilized is a month she could get pregnant, and the outdated advice to “wait until six months” is part of why shelter and rescues stay overwhelmed.
USA champions Feline Fix by Five, a research-backed, veterinary-endorsed campaign to move that standard earlier, by five months of age. It’s endorsed by the AVMA, AAHA, FelineVMA, and ASV, plus 16 individual state veterinary medical associations — this isn’t a fringe idea, it’s where the profession is heading.
By the end of 2025, 363 veterinarians and clinics had joined as participating providers, each one helping rewrite the standard of care for cats in their community.
Throughout 2025, we’ve been preparing for a major milestone; celebrating 10 years of Feline Fix by Five in 2026. That’s a decade of moving the needle on when spay/neuter happens, nationwide. Learn more at felinefixbyfive.org.
HQHVSN Wet Labs
USA facilitates wet labs to provide hands-on training to veterinarians interested in learning high-
quality, high-volume spay/neuter (HQHVSN) techniques. Our goal is to establish a replicable model that can be adopted by communities nationwide, empowering more veterinarians to participate in HQHVSN initiatives within their regions.
Since the launch of this program in late 2022, wet labs have provided training to 103 veterinarians in 9 states. A wet lab with MSPCA-Angell in Boston, MA is scheduled for June 8, 2024 and will provide training to 4 more veterinarians.
Learn more about the HQHVSN wet lab program here: https://www.unitedspayalliance.org/hqhvsn-wet-labs.
Community Cats Grants Program
The Community Cats Grants program offers a matching grant of $2,000 to grassroots organizations. But the match means every grantee must first raise funds of their own to unlock it.
That’s by design: the program doesn’t just pay for surgeries, it builds small, grassroots groups into stronger, more sustainable organizations, one matched dollar at a time.
Originally launched in 2017 by our sister organization, the Community Cats Podcast, the program transitioned to USA at the start of 2024.
In 2025 alone, that model turned $137,400 in USA grants into support for 69 organizations and 4,911 cats. And the multiplier effect compounds over time: since 2017, $549,601 in grants has driven $857,006 in grantee fundraising — a combined $1,406,607 that’s spayed/neutered over 26,111 community cats nationwide.
Learn more at unitedspayalliance.org/community-cat-grants.
Summerlee Sustainable Solutions Grants
Launched in 2025 with support from the Summerlee Foundation and the John J. Sparacio Foundation, this program takes a different approach: instead of just funding surgeries, it builds organizations. Every grantee completes an 8-week Community Cat Program Management certification through Benerd College at the University of the Pacific before receiving funds — ensuring lasting capacity, not just a one-time surgery count.
In its first cohort, the program funded 39 organizations across 22 states and the US Virgin Islands, awarding $246,000 in targeted grants. At the end of 2025, grantees had already sterilized almost 3,000 cats — with the certification model producing shared tools and innovations, like a Community Cat Calculator built by one grantee and adopted across the entire cohort.
Learn more at unitedspayalliance.org/summerlee-grant.
Veterinary Shortage Task Force
Formed in response to a 2022 report estimating a national backlog of 2.7 million spay/neuter surgeries, the VSTF brings together veterinarians, shelter directors, policy advocates, and other animal welfare leaders to tackle one root problem: there simply aren’t enough veterinarians to meet demand. The task force’s conversations directly shape USA’s programs — our high quality, high volume spay/neuter (HQHVSN) wet labs exist because of VSTF discussions on building surgical capacity — and continue to inform initiatives like Feline Fix by Five and Spay Vet Net. The VSTF met regularly throughout 2025 and remains central to USA’s work expanding real, meaningful spay/neuter capacity nationwide.
Learn more at unitedspayalliance.org/vet-shortage.
Keeper of the Flame Task Force (KFTF)
Launched in 2024, KFTF exists to keep spay/neuter in the spotlight. Prevention-focused work is only as strong as the public and philanthropic will behind it — and this task force develops strategies to keep communities and funders alike focused on why prevention remains the solution to cat and dog homelessness, even as other priorities compete for attention. KFTF continued its work throughout 2025, ensuring the case for prevention stays loud, current, and impossible to ignore.
United Spay Alliance Online Conference
Advocacy work can feel like a solo mission, until you realize how many other people are fighting the same fight. Each year, USA co-hosts the United Spay Alliance Online Conference alongside our sister organization, the Community Cats Podcast, bringing the whole movement into one (virtual) room to share strategies, success stories, and hard-won lessons.
Since launching in 2020, the conference has welcomed over 1,100 registrants from across the country and around the world. 2025 was our biggest year yet, with 388 people registered — proof that this movement is only growing.
Learn more at unitedspayalliance.org/conference.
United We Spay, a podcast from United Spay Alliance
Not everyone doing this work has someone to talk to. United We Spay was built to change that — a monthly podcast connecting listeners to real voices from across the spay/neuter movement, from grassroots wins to lessons learned the hard way.
In 2025, its second full year, USA released 12 episodes and reached 2,039 downloads — proof that advocates nationwide are hungry for shared knowledge.
Catch up on the latest episodes at unitedspayalliance.org/podcast.
No Babies. No Rabies.
Dog-mediated rabies has been virtually eliminated in the United States. Thanks to the combined work of public health & animal welfare professionals, countless dogs and cats receive their rabies vaccination at the time of their spay/neuter surgery.
In 2025, USA launched No Babies. No Rabies. a campaign making the public health case for animal welfare: fewer unwanted litters means fewer stray and unvaccinated animals, which means fewer vectors for rabies transmission. We took that message directly to the public health community at the 2025 APHA Annual Meeting in Washington DC, connecting with professionals who’d never considered spay/neuter part of their toolkit, and collected over 700 leads for ongoing partnership.
This is just the beginning. No Babies. No Rabies. is a priority we’re carrying forward into 2026 and beyond, as we build new bridges between animal welfare and public health.
Learn more at unitedspayalliance.org/public-health.
See Our 2024 Impact
Download the United Spay Alliance 2024 Annual Report to see how we’ve expanded access to affordable spay/neuter nationwide.