Humane Fort Wayne Turns a New Shelter Into Clinic Work

Humane Fort Wayne placed 3,084 animals in homes in 2025, a record in the first full year at its Leesburg Road shelter. That is 1,099 more adoptions than the 1,985 the group logged in 2024, the year it cut the ribbon on the Sharon Bodenhafer Critter Center.

On Dec. 3, 2024, Executive Director Jessica Henry-Johnson sat for a Giving Tuesday interview and asked Fort Wayne to keep that campus going. The donation day still matters. The quieter change is that the new building let the group split clinic work, take a seven-figure vet-care grant, and operate as a private no-kill network beside a city shelter Best Friends Animal Society ranked near the bottom of the country on 2023 data.

A Giving Tuesday Interview, Then a Scorecard

Humane Fort Wayne was created when the Allen County SPCA and HOPE for Animals merged on January 1, 2021. Henry-Johnson has led the work since 2012. The group takes no city tax dollars, and it still passes the hat every December because payroll, surgery, and kibble do not fund themselves.

Giving Tuesday 2025 brought in $222,815, including a full challenge match, the organization said. That haul sits on top of a 2024 operating year in which donations were $1,712,458 and events added $355,441, including a Pawject Runway night that raised $264,000. Surgery-clinic fees were $1,101,060. Wellness-clinic fees were $1,010,523. Together those two clinic lines brought in $2,111,583, more than donations did.

The 2024 operating-revenue total was $4,686,438 once adoption fees of $176,110, grants of $225,200, and $105,646 in other income are counted. A shelter that bills itself as a home-finding charity already made more money treating animals than it took in from checks and online gifts, and that was before Clinic Plus opened.

Where the Sharon Bodenhafer Critter Center Stands

The new shelter sits on just over 5 acres at 901 Leesburg Road, with a second street face at 901 St. Francis Drive. The 2024 annual report lists the building at 26,000 square feet, with twice as much room for dogs and three times as much for cats as the old 7,400-square-foot house at 4914 Hanna Street. Design Collaborative drew Design Collaborative’s Leesburg Road plans. Weigand Construction built them.

Ribbon cutting was Aug. 14, 2024, after construction and permits pushed the date out of July. Animals stayed on Hanna Street through late August, then moved. Henry-Johnson told the builder the campus would help homeless pets find homes and would provide spay, neuter, and wellness work for more than 30,000 animals every year. In 2024 the group actually logged 14,766 wellness visits and 10,581 surgeries, or 25,347 clinic touches, so the 30,000 line is a capacity claim, not that year’s count.

FROM THE LEAD GIFT TO THE RIBBON

1. 2019: Chuck Bodenhafer gives $1 million to start the capital campaign in memory of his wife, Sharon.
2. January 1, 2021: Allen County SPCA and HOPE for Animals merge as Humane Fort Wayne.
3. February 16, 2023: The group opens the public phase of its $14 million Homeward Bound campaign, asking for the last $1.5 million.
4. June 22, 2023: Groundbreaking at 901 Leesburg Road, with Mayor Tom Henry on site.
5. August 14, 2024: Ribbon cutting at the Sharon Bodenhafer Critter Center.
6. January 6, 2025: Wellness clinic work moves onto Leesburg Road and Saturday hours begin.
7. August 1, 2025: Clinic Plus opens on St. Francis Drive, and walk-in wellness returns to Maycrest Drive.

The ceremony is on video, with Henry-Johnson thanking the crew that laid the block.

Clinic Work Now Runs on Two Campuses

On Jan. 9, 2025, the group announced a $1 million PetSmart Charities grant under the Accelerator program. Phase one had been $150,000 in 2023. Phase two, Henry-Johnson said, would turn Maycrest Drive into a public-facing spay-and-neuter center and double surgeries for both owned pets and shelter animals. Shelter sterilizations were slated to move to Leesburg Road in the second quarter of 2025, so Maycrest could keep family pets on its tables.

Our veterinary system is in crisis. Rising costs are putting standard veterinary care out of reach for as much as 50% of pet-owning families.

Kate Atema, director of community grants and initiatives, PetSmart Charities

PetSmart Charities put the national hole at 50 million pets without basic care, with pets in as many as 70% of households. Humane Fort Wayne used the money, and the extra rooms, to stop stuffing every appointment into one lobby. The first try still overflowed. In August 2025 the group moved walk-in wellness back to Maycrest, where the lot and lobby are larger, and opened Clinic Plus by appointment on St. Francis Drive for ears, skin, mild sedated exams, and end-of-life care. Clinic Plus does not take sick, injured, or emergency cases.

THREE ADDRESSES, THREE JOBS

• Leesburg and St. Francis: The Sharon Bodenhafer Critter Center holds adoptions and Clinic Plus, with Clinic Plus hours on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
• 1333 Maycrest Drive: Walk-in wellness runs Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturday from 8 a.m. to noon, and the spay-neuter clinic stays here by appointment.
• 4914 Hanna Street: The pet food pantry still distributes on Saturday from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m., and the building is slated to become Pet Promises headquarters.

Wellness hours had already gone from 30 a week to 40 when the clinic first landed on Leesburg Road in January 2025. The Maycrest return stretched weekday walk-ins to 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Dr. Min Jung Kim arrived in 2024 as the first director of veterinary medicine. By early 2026 the medical bench included four veterinarians plus a training vet, and the shelter had started in-house heartworm treatment.

The City Shelter’s 2023 Dog Save Rate Was 58.58%

Humane Fort Wayne is a limited-intake, no-kill operation. Best Friends Animal Society tagged it again after a 99.2% live release rate in 2023, above the 90% bar that group uses. The org still prints “no-kill shelter” on its own pages. Fort Wayne Animal Care and Control, at 3020 Hillegas Road, is the open-intake city shop, and it posted a different 2023 record.

Hip, Hip, HUMANE!! 🎉

Humane Fort Wayne is celebrating yet another year as a #nokill shelter with a live release rate of 99.2% in 2023! We commend you for your hard work and dedication to saving countless animals! @ABC21WPTA @HumaneFWhttps://t.co/Alao7derWE ^aq

— Best Friends (@bestfriends) September 13, 2024

Stacy Rogers, then Best Friends’ central region director, said Fort Wayne ranked in the bottom 10% of reporting shelters on overall save rate and in the bottom 5% on dog save rates. The 2023 dog save rate was 58.58%. She also said the city department accounted for nearly 40% of Indiana’s shelter euthanasias while taking about 8% of the state’s intake. Amy-Jo Sites, the city director, said more breeding and too little training for aggressive dogs were driving the numbers, and that a surgery-and-wellness partnership with Humane Fort Wayne was still not enough.

WHERE EXPERTS DISAGREE

• Rogers’ read: A 58.58% dog save rate, about five dogs in ten leaving alive, does not match what other shelters see even when they get tough cases.
• Sites’ read: Animals arriving over the counter are often unvaccinated, unaltered, and behaviorally hard, and those are not the pets most adopters want.

Those figures are 2023. Newer city tallies were not in the public set used here. The split still explains why a private group spent $14 million on Leesburg Road and still begs on Giving Tuesday. It can choose its intake. The city cannot. Humane Fort Wayne also pulls from crowded shelters, including 20 dogs after Hurricane Helene in October 2024, all later adopted, and it sent staff to help Wabash County after a 29-dog hoarding case.

Adoptions Hit 3,084 in the First Full Year

2023, the last full year on Hanna Street, closed at 1,997 adoptions. 2024, the move year, slipped to 1,985. 2025, with the Critter Center open all year, jumped to 3,084. The organization called it a record. GuideStar still lists intake “over 2,500” as a program note; the adoption series is the cleaner public scorecard.

ADOPTIONS AFTER THE MOVE

The extra 1,099 placements in 2025 are the first full-year test of the Homeward Bound bet. More kennels only help if someone takes the dog home, and if the clinic keeps that dog out of the building in the first place.

2024 SHELTER AND CLINIC COUNT

• Spay and neuter: 10,581 surgeries.
• Wellness visits: 14,766 pets seen.
• Pet food: 272,434 pounds given out.
• Help staying home: 2,099 pets got financial assistance, and 738 volunteers logged 17,976 hours.

Local television still treats the group as a Friday adoption board, which matches how most people meet it. The volume that changed after Leesburg opened is the clinic line, not the cute-cat clip.

A $1 Million Gift From Chuck Bodenhafer

Sharon Bodenhafer died of cancer in 2017. She and Chuck had been married 49 years, took in strays on Fort Wayne’s north side, and she called the animals her critters. In 2019 he gave $1 million to name the future building. Kathy Roudebush, who ran the campaign, said Sharon had run a rescue out of her own home. The couple had already moved to Florida, and they had not been Humane Fort Wayne regulars before the gift.

Every one of our friends who knew Sharon and knew what she was doing and knew how much she loved animals and how she treated them, said if they were going to be reincarnated, they wanted to come back as one of Sharon’s critters.

Chuck Bodenhafer, lead donor, groundbreaking remarks

Henry-Johnson said yes to the name as soon as the million-dollar offer came with it. Covid then slowed fundraising in 2020 and 2021. The public was asked in February 2023 to finish the last $1.5 million of the $14 million campaign. The building that resulted is the thing Giving Tuesday 2024 was selling. The name on the glass is the thing a widower bought so Fort Wayne would remember who loved the critters first.

Hanna Street Waits While Students Get Clinic Time

The old flagship at 4914 Hanna Street is still in the plan as Indiana’s first freestanding social-service shop for pets and the people who keep them, wrapping the pet food pantry, compassion foster, in-home help, and quarterly vaccine clinics under Pet Promises. As of the group’s 2025 clinic notice, that renovation had not been marked complete. Saturday food distribution still ran there from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m.

On Sept. 17, 2026, Humane Fort Wayne said the Taco Bell Foundation had awarded $10,000, nominated by the local Team Lyders franchise, for a paid veterinary-care internship in summer 2027. Students ages 16 to 22 would work in the clinic. “This grant gives students meaningful, hands-on experience in veterinary medicine while helping them explore paths they’re passionate about,” Henry-Johnson said. Zeigler Subaru had already sent more than $18,000 in May 2026. The staffing problem is the same one Atema described: there are more appointments than cheap veterinarians.

The 2024 Giving Tuesday interview asked Fort Wayne to fund a vision. The vision is now a 26,000-square-foot shelter, a two-campus clinic, a $1 million PetSmart grant, and 3,084 adoptions in 2025. Hanna Street is still waiting for its second life, and the first paid intern class is not due until summer 2027.