Episode 2 — Silja Schiller-Moumtzidis: The Zero Stray Pawject

Chip (intro):  Silja Schiller-Moumtzidis might have started one of the most unusual nonprofits ever with the Zero Stray Pawject. You heard right, it’s pawject, not project. Their mission systematically eradicates the problem of stray dogs and cats by addressing the root causes through prevention.

If you’re not a believer that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, you will be after hearing Silja describe her work and impact. During the course of our conversation, Silja put forward the best three guidelines for a nonprofit leader I’ve ever heard. And now, without hounding you further, I give you Silja Schiller-Moumtzidis and the Zero Stray Project.

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Chip: Silja Schiller-Moumtzidis. Welcome. It’s great to see you.

Silja: Thank you, Chip. Thank you for having me. Great to be here.

Chip: Oh, my pleasure.

Silja: Let’s start by you telling me and our audience about the mission and vision of the Zero Stray Pawject, and notice “Pawject”. I hope I got that right.

Yeah, it’s a love project that we started about 10 years ago. Zero Stray Pawject is an 501(c)(3)organization we’re also a German EV (Eingetragener Verein), registered in Germany. We’re trying to really bring a systematic approach to the problem of strays.

And what I mean by that is, there are a lot of amazing organizations out there who are doing shelter work, who are doing rescue work, who are doing TNR work. TNR means Trap Neutral Release. However, so far there are very few organizations out there, from what we’ve seen, that really try to think about a more systematic way.

How do we prevent the number of strays? How do we ensure that we intervene before a dog or a cat ends up homeless and homelessness can happen through various ways. But, that’s really our purpose to bring a systematic solution and we work very much with, local municipalities, governments, police, and the judicial.

Chip: That’s fantastic. You’ve heard the expression, an ounce of prevention, pound of cure, right?

Silja: Yeah, exactly. We’re trying to shift the focus towards prevention.

Chip: Yeah.  Tell me what inspired you to get started.

Silja: Well, as many organizations, we actually started out of an emotional response. So it’s more of a private story. My husband, who is Greek, I’m German — from the accent you can probably hear that — living in New York. We got married in Greece, and the first thing I said is I wanted to have a dog. But I wanted to have a dog from the street or from a shelter.

The hotel recommended a place where we could adopt a dog. We didn’t go to that place, but we met the woman, chose a dog in an abandoned house which was all very wild. We brought him back and that could be the end of the story. He’s still with me. He’s right now lying next to me; he’s 13 years old.  A year later we came back to that island in Greece where we got married and had to unfortunately find out the sad truth that the woman who was running this so called shelter was not running a shelter, but a hoarding place.

And when we visited, it was emotionally so draining that my husband and I, who were both working in very different environments and positions, decided to do something about it and not just to fly back to New York, thinking, “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry for these dogs, but we can’t do anything about it.”  We started working with that person — with the hoarder, which was emotionally very draining — starting to build a shelter and then quickly realized that building a shelter is never the solution.  Because no shelter in the world can ever be big enough to accommodate every stray dog.

And that’s how we pivoted to what we’re doing today.

Chip: In the first couple of years after you committed to starting a nonprofit, what were the biggest challenges you faced?

Silja: I want to go away from the shelter because the shelter was an amazing experience: running and setting up a shelter, getting support to build a shelter, working with this woman and her friends.  We learned a lot, but there was a very different experience because also we live in New York, so we were in Mykonos every three months and that was quite challenging.

Thankfully, my company, WPP allowed me to travel with my husband in the strategy consulting firm so he could be more flexible. I think the real challenges happened or started when we pivoted to something more systematic. And the biggest challenge that we faced right in the beginning or even today still is [working with] the municipalities….

So even though we are 501(c)(3), we focus entirely on Greece and, Greece is a country with 10 million inhabitants and an estimated 1. 2 million pets in homes… and an estimated 3 million homeless pets as strays or in shelters.

Chip: More than twice as many.

Silja: And that’s according to [reputable authorities] who launched an index called the State of Pet Homelessness Index. So you have 1. 2 million pets in homes. That’s demand,  and you have 3 million pets on the street. That’s the supply. So you have an excess supply. And Greece is not the only country.

There are so many countries in the world where you have an excess supply of pets. The first problem that we faced is that municipalities are just way over the hat.

There are so many strays everywhere, cats and dogs. I can’t really do anything about it. It’s just too big. The second problem is that because there’s so many strays, many municipalities see that as one of their top five priorities to fix, but they just don’t know how to fix it.

They have no… there’s no blueprint for municipalities to follow. So I think the fact that there are so many and municipalities are overwhelmed, and governments in general, and not knowing how, that is an issue. And the last problem that we saw is even when municipalities or governments, because we now also get calls from governments who basically ask us as private individuals, “What do we do?”

We hear all the time, “We put all this money into building a shelter, doing TNR and nothing works and nothing changes.” And that’s probably the biggest issue that anybody faces who wants to get involved with [strays].

Chip: Do [your partners in] the Greek government still believe in building shelters after working with you?

Silja: It depends who you ask. So I think we’ve done hopefully a good job to convince many politicians that building a shelter is not the solution.  Greece has 332 municipalities. We’re working now with 119 municipalities. So we trained them… So what we’re doing right now is …on the ground stray prevention programs working with municipalities, and we set up the first academy, to my knowledge in the world.  I might be wrong, but the first academy to train municipalities how to reduce the number of strays.  How to improve welfare for pets and people, because stray pets are a public health and public safety problem.

With that in mind, from the 190 municipalities that we work with, there are many municipalities who are now realizing that the problem is man-made, so just building a shelter and putting all the dogs and cats into a shelter is not going to be the solution.  But you still have mayors who say, ”But that’s a quick fix. I only have five years of a term, so I need to do something during these five years.  If you tell me to go and think about responsible pet ownership that takes too long because I won’t get reelected.”  So it depends who you talk to, but yes, we hopefully managed to get people convinced of that.  And shelters, by the way, are very necessary. So I don’t want to dismiss shelters.

Chip: I was going to ask you that. You don’t see this work, at least at this stage, as the elimination of shelters.

Silja: No. No matter what, even in countries where you have almost zero strays, you will have shelters that are absolutely full. Shelters are really important. My point is just, in order to really reduce the number of strays, you need to think about where are strays coming from?  They’re not growing on trees.

Every stray on the street was one someone’s pet or the puppy or kitten of someone’s pet. Once you realize that, what is the root cause of strays? Abandonment in Greece, abandonment and over-production. So I call it very bluntly irresponsible pet ownership. So in order to really bring down the number of strays, and we’ve shown it in one of our pilot programs in Aegina, you need to make sure that the majority of owned pets have microchip and are registered, which is, by the way, the law in Greece, not so much in … the U.S, but in Greece and many European countries.

It’s by law that owned pets must be microchipped and registered. And then secondly, you need to ensure that you have a way to avoid overproduction. We launched a lot of surveys over the years, and in one of the longitudinal studies that we ran, about 800 dog owners, real life dog owners, we asked, did your female have a litter?  And if so, was the litter intentional or not intentional?  62 percent of these litters were not intentional.  And with that in mind, you just need to think about how the problem is manmade. So unless you ensure responsible pet ownership, that vicious cycle of abandonment and overproduction will continue.

However, there are people who for very legitimate reasons need to give up their pets. If somebody has an allergy, if somebody moves, if you get convicted, if you have to leave your house and you don’t know where to go, you need to make sure that you have a shelter. But right now in Greece, the situation is there is not even a shelter that has any space for you, because every shelter is so full that you can’t even surrender.  So all I’m saying is, shelters are desperately needed. But having a shelter as the solution to a problem that is man-made, that doesn’t make sense.

Chip: Yeah. That’s very understandable in a country where the population of homeless to cared-for animals or adopted pets is three to one. So you’re really serving as an intermediary then, between pet owners and…  or the government is really the one serving as an intermediary between you and the pet owners. You don’t really work directly with individual pet owners, right?

Silja: We do.  Because we work through municipalities to basically ensure that pet owners are responsible. But again, our main stakeholder groups….  So you have either  “before” the pet ends up on the street, so that’s microchipping, education, neutering, making sure that the police does their work. For example, as microchipping and registering is mandatory by law to do checks.

And then you have the “after” the pet is on the street. So the pet was abandoned and that’s where most animal welfare, at least in Greece plays right now, which is shelter, TNR, adoptions, etc.  But that’s unfortunately too late.

So once the pet is on the street, or homeless, all you can do is take that pet from the street, bring it to a shelter and then adopt it. And that’s great. But again, if you have 3 million excess pets, how do you find more owners? So what we’re doing is we’re working with municipalities, with the police, with the judicial to enforce laws and to ensure that pet owners are responsible.

So we have set up our pilot market. So let’s move away from the shelter, that’s how we started [the conversation]. So we really started our work in 2017. We went to an Island called Aegina and ran a proof of concept. What we did is we worked with the mayor. we went to him and said, “You have a problem. We know that you have an excess amount of stray dogs. You have two shelters who are doing incredible work on this island and who are trying to bring as many pets into homes, but you still have these 200, 300 stray animals, stray dogs on the street. They form packs, and again, they had lawsuits for apparently being bitten.”

So we came to him and said, “We have a solution for you, but what you need to do is you need to make sure that you have resources available. We bring you the money. We don’t even ask you for money. We bring you the money, but you need to have resources available.” So the way, what we set up is we set up a dog registry for the municipality.

Obviously we don’t have access to that because that’s PII data, but we set up the specifics for them and we helped the municipality to fill that dog registry by ensuring that pet owners would microchip and register. That was phase one. We did that through various ways.

Number one, we did something very positive, a lottery.  So every two weeks, a dog owner who microchipped and registered could win 200 euros for 12 months. Super successful in terms of PR; everybody loved it. Not successful in terms of outcome. We [only] had 160 dogs microchipped and registered and great. Because we failed and we pivoted and learned.

What we learned is that the microchip cost was too high. So what we did then is we actually went, that’s phase one, but in phase one B, we subsidized microchipping through amazing partners like T Shirts Gesellschaft, a German entity, they helped us to fund this. We subsidized microchipping for owners who couldn’t afford it.

And then we also worked with the police, and that was the first time in Greece working with the police.  We donated microchip scanners. It took us two years to get them on board but once we finally got them on board, they actually formed a police force and walked around the island, knocked on doors and [asked] owners if their dog was microchipped and  registered.

Now, when we started on the island, we had almost 0% owned dogs microchipped and registered.  When we left in 2021, after three years, 2022 to four years, we had 75 percent of all dogs microchipped and registered. So there was phase one, which was great, but the microchip is not hereditary to the puppy. So if a puppy is born, the puppy is not known.

So the [issue] of anonymity – what dog was abandoned and why was the dog abandoned — ….was taken care of, but the [newborn] puppy issue [neutering] was not.  So phase two of that was, we collected data from. the municipality, we helped the municipality to collect data from every dog owner.

So every dog owner who was microchipping and registering had to go back to the municipality to hand in their chip certificate. And Mrs. Adzina, the director of public health under the mayor, who was basically our partner in this, set every dog owner down and filled in a questionnaire.  Is your dog neutered?  If not, why not?

So we had now in phase two, we had all the dog owner data and we helped the municipality. We just told them how to do that. They clustered all the different data and then they sent out messages to each of the dog owners in these clusters. For example, if somebody said my dog lives in a contained environment, we used studies and data to say, “understood.”

But did you know that 62 percent of these puppies might be actually unintentional?  If somebody said, I want to breed, Mrs. Adzina then called them and said, dear owner, I’m totally fine if you want to breed, but make sure you have 10 homes lined up because you can end up with 10 puppies.

If someone said, “I can’t afford [neutering]”, we offered, again, subsidies to basically neuter their pet for 20, 25 years instead of 2. Funded through Zero Stray Pawject, funded through the Burosaki Foundation, funded through Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, and that over time…brought down the number of stray dogs from roughly 200 in 2017 when we started, to roughly 30 in early 2022 when we left.

And so again we went to dog owners, but not directly. We helped the municipality. We equipped the municipality get to the dog owners.

Chip: What were the biggest hurdles? Clearly a partnership with municipalities is critical. What were the biggest hurdles that the municipalities had to overcome in working with you? And then what were the biggest hurdles that pet owners had to overcome in working with you [and the municipalities]?

Silja: I think the biggest hurdles when we started were, nobody knew us, right?  Who’s the Zero Stray Pawject?  What do you guys want?  Why are you coming here now? What did go well is that we talk very differently. We talk more with data and insights, and we want to help you instead of saying you are terrible. So that actually helped. But again, we didn’t have a brand. We had nobody, no recognition factor.  Nobody knew who we were; just like a couple of people from the U.S. and half Greek, half Americans who wanted to do something to help. And even today the hurdle is…. So that’s on the municipality side.

So let me start with the municipality. Even today, when I go to the academy, so now we work with 119 municipalities. The hurdle is still that mayors see the imminent problem of several thousand strays that I need to take care of. And if we say that in order to bring down that problem you have to invest into the pet owner.  You have to make sure that every pet is microchipped and registered, every owned pet is microchipped and registered, and every own pet is either neutered or DNA tested.

We didn’t talk about this, but Greece is the first country that made DNA testing mandatory. So to avoid unwanted puppies, it’s a shift in mindset because the imminent problem is, “I have 5,000 strays in my municipality. What do I do about this?”  Let’s take 5, 000 strays and put them somewhere again, coming back to a shelter.  Let’s build a massive shelter and just put all the 5, 000 strays in there. It’s this mindset shift to say it will not work because even if you take these 5,000 strays off the street and magically bring them into loving homes, let’s assume you don’t talk about a shelter. Tomorrow you will have another 5, 000 strays if you don’t stop the root cause, which is man-made.

So that is on the municipality side. On the pet owner side, it’s more a change of mindset. Many pet owners in Greece believe that they’re not doing anything wrong by not neutering and letting their not neutered dog or cat roam.

They don’t realize, “Oh, wait a minute, if I have a male dog and he’s not neutered and there’s a female somewhere, my male dog could impregnate that female and that female will produce more puppies.”  There was also a misconception a little bit about neutering. It’s bad for the dog or the cat and they should, even like women, we hear this sometimes; a female dog needs have the joy of motherhood.

No. So all this obviously contributes because if you already have 3 million strays and then you breed and even intentional or unintentional, it will contribute to the problem. So we’re hoping that we can shift that mindset a little bit.

Chip: Yeah. So with the municipalities, you probably have some data that shows — and I’m interested in what that data might look like — the cost of allowing strays to be created unencumbered and the cost of the prevention.

Silja: Yes. And actually that’s a study I wanted to run for a very long time with one of the biggest ones, McKinsey BCG. We haven’t done that study yet, but it’s very evident [that the cost of prevention is less ]because we actually have [worked with] the chief economic advisor to the prime minister, Alex Patel. So let me shift towards the to the academy.

So after and then I answer that question. So after we have the success in Aegina — 300 to 30 — we had a lot of municipalities who reached out to us in Greece and also abroad  to say, “Wow, you’ve done something that I have not heard anybody else achieve. We want to learn from you, sounds like your approach is the right one.  How can we work with you?”

So we were a very small team. It’s basically my husband and I, and we had a person in Greece as well. Sophia, three people. how can you do that to roll out across all of Greece with 332 municipalities?  So we had the idea to set up an academy. So I believe – and I might be wrong – it’s the first academy that trains municipalities. Now, …we have certain knowledge, but there are so many other experts who bring knowledge in. So we tried to bundle our knowledge with experts from all over the industry. To bring all this together to give everybody a voice.

We now have 42 subject matter experts — we call them professors — to talk about their area of expertise from government officials to veterinarians to judges to animal welfare people to police sergeants, and when one of these people that talks, it’s like a five week intensive training course that municipalities go through every month actually.

And in that league of subject matter experts or professors, we have the chief economic advisor to the prime minister talking about strays and he makes that argument to the municipalities to say, “Guys, strays are not good for the economy. Let me tell you this as chief economic advisor, because strays are a problem to public health, to public safety, and it’s inhumane.

We have tourism coming to Greece. If you look at the Trip Advisor you have some amazing ratings, but you also have a lot of people saying, “I don’t want to go back to Greece. It’s terrible what happens with animals there.” So he actually talks more about the economy. He doesn’t use numbers, but he talks about the economy.

How important it is economically not just for a mayor — because the mayor thinks about trash collection about education about health — but hey, by the way, if you solve the problem of strays, you can also bring more prosperity to your municipality. So in that context, we’re using that.

Chip: Good. Presumably the municipalities who are doing absolutely nothing about strays might be the hardest converts because they’re not putting forward any resources, right?  How does it look across all of Greece at this point?  How long have you been working in Greece with this program?  Leveraging municipalities, leveraging your academy with subject matter experts, how long have you been working and are you starting to see things shift at a higher level?

Silja: The academy was only established in September 2021. So quite new. The Aegina proof of concept — which the academy is based on — happened between 2017 and 2018.  Actually, we got the green light at the end of early 2018 and 2022, early 2022.  The shelter was between 2016 and 2017. So you can see, we established, we evolved from the shelter to something more systematic — to an academy — now.

With the academy, what we’re doing is training municipalities. So they go through a five week training course. It’s all online because it’s very hard to get municipal workers from all over Greece into one room. That would require travel, permission, and lots of money. So we do that virtually and also for our professors, subject matter experts who are all over Greece.

And also some of them are in the U.S.  We can’t have them … in person every month to come together. So we started in September 2021. We have now 190 municipalities. What happens after the municipality graduates, it is paired up with one of our so-called account managers.

So we have now six people in Greece who are looking after a portfolio of municipalities in a region; so North, West, South, Crete, et cetera, and all account managers then work with a portfolio of 20 to 30 municipalities — hand in hand — to implement the learnings. So the municipality went through that training and now let’s implement the legislation.

The new legislation in 2021 gives very strict requirements to municipalities. We build a scorecard to say, “You need to do 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. 7, 22 requirements. And by the way, you also need to make sure that you have the number of microchipped and registered pets grow in your municipality because we’ve proven that this will lead to zero stress in combination with DNA.

So of the 190 municipalities, we see around 50 to 60 municipalities who are doing very active work. The other municipalities are changing day by day. So maybe tomorrow we have another municipality coming on board and saying, actually now we have that money.

The municipalities doing very active work; what are they doing? They’re really trying to make sure that they hit the level [described by the] legislation. By the way, that’s for all municipalities. Our target is 280 municipalities by end of 2025. So that’s our target, and then obviously continuing onwards, because municipal leaderships are changing, right?

So there are changes to their elections.   We see a lot of municipalities really implementing change and that keeps us going because you what we’re doing is a mid to long term, so you will not see change overnight. You will not see, even if we start in 2021, you will not see change in 2024 immediately because — even Aegina, a small island of 200 stray dogs — it took us four years to get that level down.

By working every stakeholder together, our hope is that by 2030, we can see significant change, which would mean very few stray dogs left because if you stop the production of strays, as in the production of own dogs that get overproduced and then abandoned.

Then you can also bring down the level of strays because the number of stray dogs on the street will at some point hopefully be taken care of by animal welfare, who are doing an amazing job in Greece. And at some point the influx will stop. Now, cats is very different because cats — they’re an estimated 2 million stray cats of the 3 million stray animals, 2 million are cats — need a slightly different approach because nobody really owns a cat.

So cats need almost like more a TNR approach, which is more difficult and more challenging and more costly. But on dogs, I hope we can see real change as in very few stray dogs left by 2030.

Chip: You already have seen real change in Aegina, right?

Silja: Correct.

Chip: Fantastic. So it seems like, one of the interesting things about nonprofits is that, sometimes nonprofits are reticent to acknowledge that they’re running experiments. Some boards don’t like to hear that. Some major donors don’t like to hear that, but everything’s an experiment.

And you’ve run some great experiments.  And some — not all of them — have been successful, but that’s the nature of experiments, right?  So at this point, and I want to transition a little bit to the less interesting stuff than the program; the mechanics of the fundraising and operations and all that for other nonprofit leaders.

But just by way of making that transition, what’s your vision now? It seems like you’ve done enough great work in Greece that you’ve got a model and you’ve learned enough that you can scale. Do you believe that’s feasible? Scaling this to other countries? Scaling it to other regions?

Silja: I would like to see Greece as a pilot market and it sounds very ambitious because Greece is a massive country with 10 million people….  I live in New York, what do we have 15 million or something? But it’s obviously a very different ballgame with you in the U.S. with 360 million people.  But I would like to see Greece become successful before we talk about scaling.

We have definitely a pilot program that has been [successful].  We were invited to various different conferences from [other organizations] to basically speak about this because what we’re doing is so different from many other people who are doing amazing work.

And the academy is also something that is very interesting to copy and paste in other countries. But right now we would like to see Greece be successful.  But I can share that we’re getting a lot of requests from other countries, which is wonderful. Panama, Cyprus, Romania, Moldova; very different countries who are reaching out and different people who reach out right now.

I always have to say we have the funding right now for Greece and also both of us — the founders, my husband and I — have full time jobs, so we’re not taking any money out of this nonprofit; it’s actually the opposite, we’re putting our own money into this.  In order to do that, we obviously need to pay our checks and we both work full time in corporations.

So with that in mind, and we have a team in Greece, we pay through the funding that we have right now from Battersea. Let’s get Greece right. Because if Greece is a massive amount of excess pets, if Greece has a success story with the legislation, with the academy, with all the work that everybody does, it’s not only us.

Chip: End to end.

Silja: Correct. Everybody working together. Then that is something that we can take to other countries and say, here is the blueprint. Let’s codify it. Why don’t you use that?

Chip: I guess the question was more around. It seems like you have close to a blueprint at this point and not that you’re going to abandon the great work you’ve done in Greece and I understand wanting to see it to, the polished finish, but it does seem like you’ve got the beginnings of a blueprint that leads to scale.

Silja: I hope, but again, we haven’t, we’ve seen it in Aegina. So I don’t want to promise anything until it’s delivered.  I have a lot of strides in Greece. And until we have been able to bring that down, not only us, everybody working together. So I don’t want to be overly arrogant to say it’s just us.  No, we bring people together to make it work.

Chip: Yeah, I appreciate your healthy skepticism. It’s the equivalent of managed growth in the private sector. You don’t want to get out ahead of your skis.  Let’s talk a little bit about fundraising. How do you do it?  Where do most of funds come from?  What’s worked? What hasn’t worked for you?

Silja: In fundraising, terrible in the sense. no, it’s really terrible.  It’s something that is not in my DNA to go out and to beg, and also it doesn’t really work with us because what we are talking about is the microchipping and we’re talking about neutering and we’re talking about things that are just not sexy.

If you have — it’s terrible to say, but — if you have an abandoned abuse dog or cat and you nurture it back to health everybody will say, “Oh my gosh, because it’s so emotional. Oh my gosh, this is beautiful. And this is amazing.”

And, so the way we fundraise now is we actually work with large organizations. For example, right now we have funded the Academy through Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, a massive UK charity.  Who has put quite a substantial amount of money into our approach because they’re looking for new innovative approaches.  So right now we are actually fine until October 2025, because they’re completely funding us.  Of course, there are lots of things that we’re funding ourselves.

For example, if we fly to Greece, we don’t put it on Battersea money. We need to pay our own salaries ourselves — not through the nonprofit — and we put a lot of money into things that are not funded through Battersea, so there’s still a lot of money that we need to put in ourselves. We have some sponsors; some private sponsors who really believe in our approach, who believe in what we’re doing and who see, because they’ve just heard about us and they want to help us.

So that’s what we have, but we don’t have a broad public [funding source].  Unfortunately, it’s very hard because we’re not fun. We’re not sexy. We are boring in the sense; microchipping, neutering, responsible pet ownership is unfortunately not as sexy and interesting.

Chip: I can see why you’re saying that, but in a way — as a data person and as someone who believes in prevention over cure — I think it’s sexier than building a ton of shelters. It’s certainly more effective, but also with respect to fundraising, hopefully the blueprint will reveal that in terms of total cost, if countries or regions just attend to prevention, it will be less costly and in some measure might pay for itself over time.

Silja: And you are absolutely right with your question. If you put 1 ounce in prevention, how much do you get out?  So right now, for example, what does a microchip cost? A microchip costs almost nothing. 30 euros, 20 euros, and that makes that dog or that cat not be able to be abandoned or reproduce because Greece is the first country, as I mentioned, that has now a DNA mandatory requirement.

But if you build a shelter that will cost you — per dog —  1,000 to 5,000 euros. So if you think about the 30 euros that you invest now, where’s the 5,000 years you need to invest afterwards. It’s a big difference.

Chip:  In the closing minutes here, Silja if you were talking to someone who is starting a nonprofit, what leadership advice would you give them?

Silja:  First of all, find your cause. What are you passionate about? Don’t just find your cause [without the passion] and think about what you want to do.

Secondly, be resilient. I’m a true believer in pilots. I truly believe that small pilots test what works, what doesn’t work. In Aegina, we tested various things that were not successful. And that was great because if you don’t fail, you don’t learn. We pivoted. So find your cause, be resilient. Pilot a lot of things. there will be a point in your life when you think I’m doing all this work and I don’t see a change yet.

Be patient because real change will not go overnight. For real change management to happen, you have to have a long breath; five, ten years. So if you have this, do it. And the best thing is you can do something better. You can make the world a little better than before. I think that’s a beautiful thing.

Chip: Those are nicely tied together; all three of those admonitions [passion, persistence, patience] connect in a nice way.

And by the way, I think you’re being humble in describing Greece as a pilot still. It’s it feels like it’s pretty much off the ground and there are some rough edges to clean up, but fundamentally it’s working, and you do have the beginnings of blueprint…. I love the thing about piloting and what was said earlier about experimenting; if you’re going to do those things you have to be patient.  That’s the nature of this work. What’s the best way for people who are interested in what you do to plug in?

Silja: After October 2025, we’re out of funding. So if somebody is interested in helping us to keep this thing alive, then of course we would be very happy to introduce us a bit more. I didn’t talk about the police training because we’re also now training the police and the judicial.

We actually have our first seminar to train. I need to be careful when I say this to provide best practices to the Supreme Court of Greece and the judges and prosecutors. So a very different, story.  We see a lot of good things happening. So yes, if somebody is interested in that, we would be very happy about [talking with them].

In terms of getting their hands on the things, we’re not an animal welfare in the sense that we need food or donations in kind.  But if somebody wants to help, they need to be in Greece because we can’t physically transport from the U.S. to Greece. If somebody wants to help us with some social media or something like that’s great as well.

But you can learn more at our website. zerostraypawect.org or zerostrayacademy.gr. Now I need to warn you because our zerostraypawject.org website is not up to date. And that’s very much my mistake because I just don’t have the time to update the website. I wish we had the time, but I want my account manager to be out working with municipalities, as much as it’s important to have a good website.  So I know that, but it’s just not priority number one.

So get in touch with us if you have ideas. We’re always open for ideas because it’s grassroots; we cannot do it without people.

Chip: Yeah. No need to apologize for an out-of-date website. That seems to be a perpetual problem in the modern world.

Silja: Possibly, yeah.

Chip: Yeah. Maybe I’m projecting thoughts about my own website, which is also in need of improvement, but Silja, thank you so much for talking with me. It’s amazing work you’re doing.

Silja:  And thank you for giving us a voice. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

Chip:  My pleasure. Okay, take care.