About Animal Welfare Fund

Animal Welfare Fund (AWF) is a US-based nonprofit organization governed by a volunteer board of directors. Our mission is to help charities that focus on the rights and welfare of animals enter various workplace giving programs like the U.S. government’s Combined Federal Campaign. (See About Federations for a discussion of their advantages.)

We share an administrative staff with sister federations involved in workplace giving. This allows us to offer our services at low cost while maintaining high quality. Our partnership – the Workplace Giving Alliance – is committed to upholding a high standard of efficiency, transparency and stewardship of pledged funds.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Nancy Rexford – President

Nancy Rexford is president of the Animal Welfare Fund, which acts as a CFC federation for animal rescue groups active at the local level. Since 2004 she has advised charities that wish to participate in the Combined Federal Campaign and has served on the boards of other organizations involved in workplace giving, including Partners for a Better World. She brings over thirty years experience in non-profit administration and governance and currently serves as the Chief Financial Officer of the Workplace Giving Alliance.

She holds degrees from Vassar College and the University of Iowa, where she studied music, English literature and creative writing. A well-known costume historian, Rexford wrote and illustrated Women's Shoes in America, 1795-1920 (Kent State University Press), which won the Costume Society of America's award as best costume book of the year 2000.She also provided the illustrations for Everyday Dress of Rural America, 1783-1800, by Merideth Wright (Dover Books).She has curated and designed several exhibitions, including All for One & One for All! Uniforms in Fact and Fantasy at the American Textile History Museum. As a consultant, she has dated and identified antique clothing, photographs and paintings in dozens of museums around the United States, including the Smithsonian Institution, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Cincinnati Art Museum, Kansas City Museum, and the Yale University Art Gallery.

Ms. Rexford is also a musician and writer and serves on the board of the New Opera and Musical Theater Initiative, a Boston-based writers' group. She has participated in NOMTI’s Advanced Writers Lab since its inception in 2007. She is currently finishing a set of 27 art songs about animals based on the poems of Carmen Bernos de Gasztold, Prayers from the Ark, as translated by Rumer Godden.

Her home has been the preferred long-term refuge for a sustained series of homeless but enterprising felines since 1970. The current resident, “Seven,” went to unusual lengths to get there, sacrificing two of her nine lives on a Pennsylvania highway in order to make a case for herself. When not visiting her colleagues at the Workplace Giving Alliance, Sevvie can typically be found napping in the filing box in the finance office.

Jeffrey Federico – Vice President

Jeff Federico currently works with The MathWorks, Inc., where he is a member of its eMarketing organization. His area of expertise is website creation and strategy, with an emphasis on site analysis and optimization.

In addition, Jeff owns various websites, with topics ranging from space exploration to social networking. His web properties currently focus on creating customizable tools which other websites utilize. Previous to his current role with The MathWorks, Jeff was a self-employed webmaster in this capacity, with approximately five years experience.

Immediately after college and during the period when Jeff's web technology focus took hold, he variously worked for a number of nonprofits in a contractor capacity. These included the Boston Symphony Orchestra, United Way of Massachusetts, Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research, Action for Boston Community Development and the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City.

Jeff is a 2001 graduate of George Washington University and holds a bachelor's degree in International Affairs, with specialization in International Politics. During his college years he gained extensive non-profit and public relations/marketing exposure.

Leona Pease – Secretary

Leona Pease has been working professionally with animals since she was 15. She is now a trained and certified Animal Control Officer for the town of Shrewsbury, MA. In that position, she works regularly with local animal rescue groups. Every month she traps twenty to thirty feral cats in the Worcester County area and transports them to be neutered at various local free clinics run by cat rescue and TNR groups (TNR=trap, neuter, release). She also volunteers at all these clinics and her goal is that every cat in Worcester County will be spayed or neutered by the time she retires.

Her rescue efforts also extend to injured wildlife, and she is a familiar face at the Tufts Wildlife Clinic, where she recently appeared with an owl she found injured in the fast lane of a major highway. She is a member of SMART (State of Massachusetts Animal Response Team), a system that trains local volunteers to set up and manage emergency shelters for animals during a disaster. She is part of both SMART’s small and large animal search and rescue team and also the specialized species team.

Before she began to focus on animal rescue and overpopulation, Ms. Pease bred dogs. She has trained and shown dogs both in confirmation and in obedience (with one of her dogs receiving the honor of being Best in Show). She is a professional all-breed groomer and has managed boarding kennels in the past. Now she fosters and rehabs toy dogs with behavior problems that make them unadoptable. She may keep one of these little troublemakers for many months, but at the end, the “fosteree” has become a friendly and well-adjusted family pet, ready to be adopted into a good home.

Financials

FY 2011