Julie Morris

Julie created a paradigm shift in the way American animal shelters operate in their communities, moving toward more focused customer service practices and creative adoption policies.

In New York City, Julie's instrumental support and assistance helped shape the Mayor’s Alliance for New York City’s Animals, a nonprofit coalition of more than 150 rescue groups and shelters that has created an ecosystem of animal welfare in the New York City region. Since 2003, more than 320,000 animals have been saved through the coalition’s efforts, and the percentage of shelter animals euthanized has dropped from 75 to less than 10 percent.

During her 30-year career at the ASPCA in New York, Julie rose to the level of Senior Vice President of Community Outreach and played an essential role in the group’s work with small, underserved, and growing shelter operations nationwide. Beginning in 2007, she oversaw the ASPCA Partnership--a collaborative, multi-year effort in key cities across the nation from Miami, Florida, to Spokane, Washington—where each community’s animal control agencies, nonprofit shelters, spay/neuter clinics, and local advocacy groups committed to work together to reduce euthanasia of homeless animals.

Notably, Julie also directed a successful large-scale animal welfare field response in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. “Julie went on instinct,” said one co-worker about the effort, “and her instinct was right.” Julie was at the helm of the ASPCA’s outreach to shelters affected by the storm, assembling and overseeing a team of experts and volunteers who not only distributed emergency supplies but established a grants program for recovery and rebuilding of shelters including the Louisiana SPCA and the Humane Society of South Mississippi.

Julie was born on December 30, 1955, to Norman Morris and Barbara Boyd-Morris in New York City, and grew up in Manhattan. She attended high school in Bethpage, Long Island. She went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in zoology from Michigan State University and a master’s degree in secondary education from Eastern Michigan University, and she studied in Bowling Green State University’s graduate zoology program before deciding to devote her career to animal welfare. During the 1980s, Julie worked her way up from shelter worker to Executive Director of the Humane Society of Huron Valley in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and then was Director of Operations of the Michigan Humane Society in Detroit.

She returned to New York in 1990 to work at the ASPCA, where she created the Shelter Outreach Department (today known as Community Outreach) as a vehicle to share resources—programs, grant funding, research and training—with shelters and rescue organizations nationwide. The department focuses on helping these organizations improve their practices in order to save more at-risk animals.

Julie was also a consultant for 20 years for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation on animal welfare grant programs, board president of the National Council on Pet Population Study and Policy, and board member and founder of the Animal Welfare Federation of New Jersey. She was also on the board of directors of Austin, Texas-based Emancipet, a nonprofit that makes high-quality spay/neuter and veterinary care affordable and accessible to all pet owners.

But a listing of these accomplishments, however substantial, doesn’t begin to explain the strength of the bonds Julie forged with so many people. A true collaborator both at work and in her personal life, she blended deep intelligence, a strong will, (usually) charming cantankerousness, and intense warmth and acceptance into all her relationships. Her friends, including several whose friendship endured over decades, knew the side of Julie that included a sharp wit and slightly jaundiced sense of humor, a love of Bruce Springsteen’s music, a truly impressive Pez dispenser collection, and an eccentric but brilliantly curated collection of original folk art.

There is a story that the ASPCA once selected five early-career employees to be mentored, and when asked to choose the mentor they wanted, all five requested Julie. Her devotion to the success of other people was generous and entirely unselfish, and she remembered the names and personal stories of nearly every shelter worker and animal-welfare advocate she’d ever met in places from Stowe, Vermont, to Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Julie is survived by her beloved siblings, Adam Morris of San Francisco and Alissa Abelson of Long Island, as well as many close and devoted friends around the world. She was a valued aunt and friend to her niece and nephew, Katie and David Abelson, and was considered an aunt as well by many other children of friends and colleagues.

Those who wish to honor Julie Morris’s life of service to animal welfare are

encouraged to support their local animal shelter in both donations and by

volunteering in her name. A memorial celebration of Julie’s life will take

place this fall.