From LinkedIn Comment to Speaking Relationship
AI for Animal Welfare
A few weeks ago, Kristen Hassen left a comment on one of my LinkedIn posts asking if I’d come talk to her class.
Kristen is the founder of Outcomes Consulting and a former executive director at Pima Animal Care Center. She runs a five-week course called AI for Animal Welfare Professionals - instructor-led, peer-to-peer learning, continuing education credits through CAWA and NACA. The people in her class are shelter directors, communications managers, foster coordinators. People running organizations on tight margins who need AI to actually work, not just theoretically work.
I replied the same day. I’ve been volunteering at shelters since 2005. This was not a cold audience.
A few emails back and forth and I had a 15-minute guest slot in her Tuesday class the following week. The topic was AI and photos - specifically, how I’m integrating AI into shelter photography work and what’s actually worth the time of people who need results, not experiments.
Fifteen minutes is enough to establish whether the overlap is real. It was. Kristen reached out afterward to set up a one-on-one Zoom.
That conversation was something I hadn’t quite expected. I went in thinking it would be a speaker briefing. What I got was closer to a peer exchange, and it went in both directions. She’d been working with Gemini Nano specifically because it edits photos without changing the appearance of the animals - which turns out to be exactly the right instinct, and something I’d been thinking about from the photography side of the table. She’s also vibe coding using Claude, which put us in a very similar place methodologically.
The Venn diagram between teaching photographers to use AI without losing their voice and teaching shelter organizations to use AI without losing theirs turned out to be almost a circle. Voice guides, prompt specificity, knowing when to stop iterating, the difference between output that sounds like someone and output that sounds like no one in particular - these are not photography problems. They’re organizational communication problems that happen to show up in the same form whether you’re writing a headshot inquiry response or an adoption bio.
I sent her a follow-up email with a few things I’d promised during the call. She invited me to speak at her First Fridays collaboration call.
First Fridays is a monthly open session for animal welfare professionals navigating AI adoption - broader than the class, open registration, people at different stages of figuring this out.
The topic Kristen wanted covered was AI and shelter photography: what tools actually help, where they create problems, and why the line between enhancement and misrepresentation matters for adoption outcomes. I had a clear point of view on the argument. What I didn’t have was hands-on experience with the specific tools her audience would be using. I work in Adobe Lightroom Classic and Photoshop for my professional editing - not what a shelter volunteer with a phone reaches for between kennel rounds. So the night before the call I ran a series of Gemini editing experiments on real shelter photos, specifically to understand what the tools could and couldn’t do for that workflow. Some worked cleanly. Some hit hard ceilings. One produced something alarming from a two-word prompt that felt completely innocent.
More on that in the paid section below.
For the deck I used NotebookLM. I fed it my outline and it generated a 15-slide presentation I exported as a PowerPoint. The design was genuinely impressive - the kind of visual polish that would have taken hours to build from scratch. The tradeoff: individual elements in the exported file weren’t editable, and there were a few errors I caught during review that needed correcting before the call. The PDF of the deck is attached to this issue. It carries the visual argument better than a description would.
The script and speaker reference card came out of a working session with Claude. By the time I sat down for the call I had a full script, a one-page bullet point reference card mapped to each slide, and five documented experiments ready if the audience wanted to go deeper.
The short version of the argument: two reactions to AI in photography and communications are common right now, and neither is useful. Uncritical adoption says AI can do everything, use it for all your imagery. Reflexive opposition says AI is fake and undermines authenticity. Both skip the actual question - does this help the animal get adopted? Operational pragmatism is the frame that actually produces useful decisions.
What happens next with Kristen I don’t know yet. My assumption is that she’s building a rotating roster of guest speakers so her monthly audience gets a range of perspectives over time. If there’s a May conversation I’d be glad to be part of it. Twenty years of shelter work, the animal welfare community, and a methodology built around authentic communication don’t often find each other in the same room. When they do it’s worth staying.
If you work in animal welfare or know someone who does, Kristen’s monthly calls are open registration. I’ve linked her organization above.
[PDF of the presentation deck attached above - free to all subscribers]
