Staff Stories: On RedRover’s Core Values

By Erin Bialecki, Director of Development –

In March 2025, I celebrated my eighteenth year at RedRover. When I was first hired, I was ecstatic to finally land my dream job, and nearly two decades later, I still feel the same. I liken my time here to other “relationships”…there have been some great years and some rough years, but what has kept me here, year after year, has been consistent through it all.

During a strategic planning session in 2018, our former President and CEO, Nicole Forsyth, gave the staff a sheet of paper with over a hundred different words listing known values. She encouraged us to go through all the words and select two that reflected what we personally believed in the most, “rolling up” some words into others to narrow our top values down to two. For example, “teamwork” and “leadership” could be considered “success,” so “success” could roll up into an overarching core value. After taking the time to carefully ponder them all, I finally had my personal top core values.

Spirituality and integrity.

Spirituality is “a broad concept encompassing a person’s search for meaning and purpose in life,” according to Google, “often involving a connection to something larger than oneself, whether that be a higher power, nature, or a sense of interconnectedness.”

I’ve known I wanted to help animals, well, forever.

Looking back on my childhood, my strongest emotions and most vivid memories involved animals. My family always had a menagerie of pets, and I constantly daydreamed of becoming a veterinarian, a marine biologist, a zoologist, or starting my own animal rescue. As a young adult, I went to school to pursue a career working with animals. I began donating to and volunteering for animal rescue organizations, and then I found United Animal Nations, now called RedRover.

All of my dreams came true when I was hired as United Animal Nations’ Membership Coordinator on March 5, 2007. Helping animals and people, and supporting other people who want to do the same, is my purpose, my spirituality. How lucky am I that I have gotten to do this every day for over eighteen years?

But not only does working here give me meaning and let me help others live a life of meaning for animals, working here, and the main reason I’ve stayed so long, lets me also live my second value – integrity.

Integrity is “the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness,” again as noted by Google. RedRover infuses integrity into every decision, big or small. It guides all of our programmatic decisions and all of our interactions with the communities, people, and pets we serve. From the way we follow the Incident Command System (ICS) when deploying our RedRover Responders volunteers, to the care and compassion we provide families when their pets are facing veterinary emergencies through our RedRover Relief program, and the non-judgmental and empathetic approach we take through all of our programs.

I chose integrity as my second value because so many other values “roll up” into it. Respect, honesty, accountability, responsibility, and authenticity are all expressions of integrity, and my team at RedRover embodies each of these values in everything they do. You can see it and feel it when you’re working with someone who operates from a place of integrity, and that’s what makes RedRover such an incredible place to work. That’s why I, and so many of my colleagues, have been here for so many years. Maybe you can feel it through RedRover’s work, and that’s why you’ve chosen to support RedRover, too.

Integrity especially plays a big part in fiscal responsibility and transparency at RedRover. We work hard to make sure we’re spending our donors’ dollars wisely and effectively. We want to make sure you know how important this is to us because we know how important it is to you. The most common ways for potential and established donors to understand how well a nonprofit is operating are through websites like Charity Navigator, Candid (GuideStar), Charity Watch, Great Nonprofits, and the Better Business Bureau (BBB). Charity Navigator and Candid not only report on finances, they report on organization goals, outcomes, and how well we listen to and support the communities we serve, which, in my opinion, are the real measures of success.

Did you know we recently received our fourth consecutive Four-Star rating from Charity Navigator, our fifth consecutive Platinum Seal of Transparency from Candid, and we have been awarded a Top-Rated Nonprofit from GreatNonprofits for eleven consecutive years? We’re also a top-rated nonprofit through Charity Watch (A-) and a BBB Accredited nonprofit through the Better Business Bureau Wise Giving Alliance. In 2024, 79 cents of every dollar was spent on important programs to support communities, and 21 cents of every dollar was spent on supporting services.

I hope sharing this information helps give you a sense of trust in RedRover and that you can feel the integrity we have through these words. And I hope that your support of RedRover also gives you a sense of meaning and purpose like it does for me, because, in the simplest terms, we truly couldn’t do this vital work without you.

Thank you for all you do for pets and the people who love them. If you have any questions about RedRover’s work or our fiscal responsibility, please email me at ebialecki@RedRover.org, I’d love to connect with you.