Community Involvement
How to be an effective leader
and get more people involved
helping animals in your community

Engaging the Community
How to recruit people and
evade tricky politics

Dennis Stearns

Dennis Stearns is president of a successful financial planning and investment management firm in Greensboro, North Carolina, and serves on the Leadership Greensboro Advisory Board, as well as a number of other community nonprofit boards and advisory committees. He is a chess expert and played on one of the winningest Pan American chess teams in U.S. history.

In November 2000, he took on the mission of guaranteeing a loving home for every cat and dog in Guilford County, North Carolina. This has now expanded to include 12 counties. Dennis is the vice president of No More Homeless Pets in the Triad, a carefully planned program to end pet overpopulation and animal cruelty. NMHP-Triad has partnerships with over 50 community groups and 35 rescue groups and animal shelters.

NMHP-Triad has helped local partner groups set up high-volume spay/neuter clinics, expand adoption programs, recruit and train volunteers, and assist whenever needed with the help of the extensive Leadership Greensboro network. Dennis believes that a successful program should "dig its well before it gets thirsty" and has worked to anticipate problems well in advance and have the right people and resources in place to solve challenges when they occur.

A few of NMHP-Triad's accomplishments are:

• Setting up focused low-income spay/neuter programs and getting both private and public funding.
• Reaching over 60,000 children in a five-county area with the MEWsic program, developed in partnership with the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra.
• Launching a community magazine to promote adoptions and pet wellness.
• Holding Super Adoption events that are the largest ever in North Carolina.
• Working with the public school system to develop a puppet show program to teach fourth graders about humane education issues in a fun way.
• Getting broad community support for ending pet overpopulation and animal cruelty, both at the "powers that be" level and the grassroots level through a special Neighborhood-by-Neighborhood program.

Dennis is a nationally recognized expert in scenario learning, the "intense visualization of alternative futures" and is a frequent conference speaker on wealth management and the humane movement, as well as the broader area of community leadership. He is a Certified Financial Planner and has served on the AAII national 401(k) council and the Journal of Financial Planning Editorial Advisory Board.