The Fix Me Van: Vanessa Getty’s Proof of Concept for Mobile Animal Care

Long before mobile veterinary clinics were recognized as a model for underserved communities, a single van was doing the work in the Bay Area. Its license plate read “Fix Me.” The name was apt in more ways than one.

The mobile spay-neuter clinic Vanessa Getty helped launch in 2005 through San Francisco Bay Humane Friends was built around a straightforward but consequential premise: many pet owners in lower-income neighborhoods couldn’t access veterinary care not because they didn’t care about their animals, but because a $400 surgery was cost-prohibitive and because no services were coming to them. Both problems needed solving simultaneously—and no existing program addressed both at once.

Getty solved them together. Working under the Peninsula Humane Society’s umbrella, she raised the funds to purchase and outfit a mobile veterinary vehicle that would drive directly into underserved communities, post its schedule in advance, and provide surgeries and vaccinations at no charge.

The van became a known quantity. Communities that had never had affordable veterinary access now had it on a regular schedule. People were lined up when it arrived. The response was consistent wherever it went: there was that much need, and that few alternatives.

The effect on Bay Area shelters was measurable. In neighborhoods where the mobile clinic operated regularly, the number of animals surrendered to San Francisco Animal Care and Control declined. Pit bull intake—a useful proxy for litter reduction in specific communities—fell visibly. Fewer unwanted litters meant fewer animals cycling into already overwhelmed facilities.

What the van proved, at a practical level, was that removing the financial and geographic barriers to sterilization could produce real change in shelter intake rates. That logic is now widely accepted. In the mid-2000s, when Getty launched the program, it was not yet a mainstream model. The “Fix Me” van was one of the early proofs of concept.

Two decades later, the program remains the only mobile spay-neuter outreach of its kind in the Bay Area. It has performed more than 9,500 free surgeries and continues to average 400 to 600 per year—numbers that reflect not a burst of early enthusiasm but a program designed to last and sustained by consistent organizational support.

Getty’s current work extends the same logic in new directions: an animal sanctuary under development in Half Moon Bay with the Peninsula Humane Society, and transfer pipelines between Central Valley shelters and Bay Area organizations where adoption rates are dramatically higher.

The van is still running. The logic behind it—that the most effective intervention happens before the crisis, not after—keeps proving itself.