Laurie Lawless, CDBC, CBCC-KA, is a mentor, trainer, consultant, and founder of Shelter Behavior Integrations (SBI).  With nearly two decades of experience in sheltering, Laurie specializes in canine behavior, playgroups, pathway planning, staff and volunteer development, and creating practical systems that reduce burnout while increasing lifesaving capacity.

Laurie's path into this work started in her early 20’s when she brought home Charlie, an anxious and reactive Boxer, from a precarious situation. 

Read Charlie's full story →

Because of Charlie, Laurie’s shelter career started the way a lot of shelter careers do: as a passionate volunteer who quickly got in way over her head, but in the best possible way. Before moving into professional shelter and behavior roles, she volunteered at her local shelter, worked at a dog daycare, attended weekend rallies advocating against puppy mills, pet stores, and dog fighting, and completed internships supporting national animal welfare campaigns.

Since then, she has experienced sheltering from just about every angle. She has worked hands-on with dogs in kennels, with adopters and the public, in private behavior consulting, dog daycare and playgroups, rescue and transport logistics, and animal cruelty response. Her roles have ranged from frontline animal care to adoption management, behavior consulting, operations and facility management, team leadership, and serving as an expert witness.

She has worked in smaller community shelters where everyone wears five hats before lunch and on large-scale cruelty responses overseeing populations of more than 250 animals at a time. Those experiences taught her an important lesson: there is no single system that works for every shelter, or even every department within the same shelter.

Having worked from the kennel floor to leadership and operations, Laurie understands shelters from both the bottom up and the top down. That perspective helps her bridge the gap between the people making organizational decisions and the staff and volunteers responsible for turning those decisions into reality every day.

Whether she is coaching staff in a play yard, talking through a difficult dog with a volunteer, facilitating a leadership meeting, or getting a little too excited about a streamlined workflow, Laurie’s philosophy is the same: Better behavior systems should make daily care easier, decisions clearer, and outcomes better, not add more work.

Through Shelter Behavior Integrations, her mission is to build practical, sustainable systems that improve communication, support better decisions, move more animals into appropriate homes, and create more adoptions, less burnout, and better lives for both animals and the people who care for them.