History of the former Pet Safe Coalition

This is the story of the volunteer group that used the name Pet Safe Coalition in Nassau County, on Long Island, New York. Purrify, which runs this site today, had no part in it. Everything below comes from the group's archived website, an archived Nassau County SPCA page, ProPublica's copy of its tax returns and the IRS revocation list. Each one is listed under Sources so you can check it yourself.

How it started

The group's 2013 website said Nancy G. Lynch created the Pet Safe disaster services program in 1999, while she was working for a human services organization. She had seen what it did to people to lose their pets after house fires and storms. So she called animal groups together, and the coalition grew from there.

The dates don't agree everywhere. The group's older About page, online from 2010 to 2012, said the idea began in 1998 and that the coalition was officially founded in 2005. We give both because we can't tell which is right.

According to the 2013 site, the coalition incorporated in 2005 as an independent not-for-profit. The same page said the IRS recognized it as a 501(c)(3) charity in 2006, and that New York State's Department of Agriculture and Markets named it the animal response team for Nassau County that year. The older About page called it the first County Animal Response Team in New York State.

Hurricanes Irene and Sandy

Hurricane Irene reached Long Island in late August 2011. The group opened a shelter for pets on the Wantagh campus of Bideawee, one of its member organizations. Its website says volunteers looked after 54 cats, dogs and a bird there for the length of the storm, and charged nothing.

In October 2012, during and after Hurricane Sandy, it worked inside Nassau County's official emergency pet shelter. The site said that, together with other not-for-profits, it cared for close to 500 animals from that storm, again free to their owners.

What happened after 2014

A Nassau County SPCA page captured in February 2015 said the SPCA was "proud to have the Pet Safe program as part of the Nassau County SPCA." By May 2015, petsafecoalition.org was sending visitors to that page. We could not find out what the Nassau County SPCA says about the program today.

The last federal tax return on record for Pet Safe Coalition Inc, of Wantagh, New York, covers 2014. It was a short-form return, filed in October 2015. The organization is on the IRS list of automatically revoked organizations, with a revocation date of 15 May 2018, and no reinstatement is recorded.

The web address lapsed after that. By May 2026 it showed only a parked page. Purrify registered it in October 2026 and built this site, which is a different thing: a directory of organizations that help animals, sponsored by a company. Read who runs it and why.

More from the archive

The group's old pages are kept here as historical content, including its About page, its stated aims and its 2012 questions and answers. If an animal needs help today, use Find help now.