It was sometime in the early 1980s at the Pleasant Bay Animal Hospital in East Harwich. Dr. Chris Donner stood behind the exam table. The smell of antiseptic hung in the air, and the lights were bright. Atop the table, a beloved pet dog. It had been hit by a car, leaving a clearly fractured femur and a good dog in deep distress. It would require surgery, but it was survivable, Dr. Bonner told the owner, a single mom whose daughter stood cautiously afar from the dog. He noticed the tears falling from her small eyes, collecting on the top of her shirt. “I can’t afford that,” the mom relented.

Taking in the sight—a distressed child, her beloved pet, an injury easily fixable, but no funds to pay—he thought about what it would mean to send them home without their pet, and what it would cost him personally to do that. Dr. Donner worked out a payment plan with the mother. It was not the first time he had taken such an empathetic approach, and it would not be the last.

Now, Dr. Donner is the founder and board member of The Sampson Fund, which helps cover the cost of critical pet care to Cape Cod residents in need. Celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2026, the nonprofit is now partnered with fifteen animal hospitals from end to end of the Cape and has committed over $2.5 million to critical pet care.

The idea came by way of longtime client Alberto Williams. Sampson, Williams’s outdoor tomcat, came to see Dr. Donner with relative frequency for patch-ups after recurring neighborhood kerfuffles. Developing a relationship with Dr. Donner over the years, Williams finally relented to Dr. Donner’s imploration to neuter Sampson. “Then I didn’t see Sampson so much, and the two of them grew old together,” Dr. Donner says. “When Sampson’s kidneys couldn’t keep up any longer, I put him to sleep.”

When Williams came to retrieve Sampson’s ashes, he pulled a check from his pocket. Dr. Donner’s first reaction was surprise. Williams was not a wealthy man—that much had always been clear—and $25 in his hands meant more than most. “I want you to use this to help somebody who can’t afford to care for their pet,” Williams told him. Dr. Donner took the check. He thought about the single mother and her daughter from years before, and the many others like them who had sat across from a vet in an exam room, forced to make an impossible decision. He thought about how many times he had worked out a quiet arrangement because the alternative was unthinkable. Here, in a $25 check from a grieving man collecting his cat’s ashes, The Sampson Fund was conceived.

The Sampson Fund relies entirely on donations from impassioned, pet-loving individuals. By raising money through office collection boxes, annual fundraisers, and word-of-mouth publicity, the fund paid out almost $160,000 in 2025. Every penny of that money went directly to hospitals, which are allotted $5,000 each month to use at their discretion.

Williams understood what many don’t consider when adopting a pet: veterinary medicine is costly. According to Forbes, the average dog owner spends $1,533 per year on essential dog expenses such as food, grooming, and routine vet care. While more than two-thirds of Americans own a pet, 42% of pet owners report they could not cover an emergency bill of $999 or less without going into debt.

“We’ve paid for cancer treatments, which is sometimes curable with surgery. We’ve paid for dental work in senior dogs when it interferes with their ability to eat. We just added a partner hospital, which has one of the only two certified behavioral veterinarians in Massachusetts. There are an awful lot of dogs that are put to sleep because of behavior problems, so we are excited to add that,” Dr. Donner says.

Colleen Burke’s dog, Blue, required emergency surgery to remove a ball that Blue swallowed while on an outing at the park. The surgery cost came out to more than $8,000. Just two weeks earlier, the Burke family lost their Pomeranian, Shep, unexpectedly. “I’m a single mother, and there’s no way I could afford that. I broke down. We had just lost little Shep. I couldn’t believe this was happening. There’s no way I can leave him like that. I was beside myself,” she says. After being referred by the veterinarian on Blue’s case, The Sampson Fund was able to cover the outstanding costs of his surgery, including imaging, anesthesia, and a surgical team that worked to remove the obstruction before it caused irreparable damage. Blue’s human six-year-old sister got her buddy back.

This is the type of story you read month after month in The Sampson Fund’s newsletter to patrons. The nonprofit helping individuals and families on a fixed income afford the lifesaving care required for their animals—anything but a farm animal, Dr. Donner says.

The fund’s structure of partnered hospitals and a monthly allotment allow individual clinics to make quick decisions and create consistent expectations. “I wanted to make sure that when we started the fund, it could be used at two o’clock in the morning for emergencies when there’s no time for a board to decide whether or not somebody qualifies for help, because often minutes can be lifesaving,” Dr. Donner says.

In order to receive assistance from the fund, you must be a resident of Barnstable, Nantucket, or Dukes counties. With Barnstable County having the highest percentage of seniors in the Commonwealth (34.8%), there are many elderly residents whose only companion may have four feet, Dr. Donner says. “It’s really important to have that companionship.”

“Last year, we helped 112 pets, which was a 42% increase from the year before. There is definitely an increase in need,” says Patti Smith, who has served as president of The Sampson Fund since 2006. She is one of nine board members who give their time freely, a fact that is not incidental to how the organization operates. The Sampson Fund has no office, an extremely limited overhead cost, and no interest in either. Every structural decision helps the fund toward the same goal: more money to the hospitals, less anywhere else.

The most exciting development in the fund’s history came by way of a bequest—a gift left in someone’s will to an organization they believed in enough to remember at the end of their life. It allowed the board to create an endowment, which made the difference between hoping the money will be there and knowing it will be. For an organization built around emergencies, that kind of permanence means The Sampson Fund is no longer just a good idea sustained by generous people, but it is built to last.

Alberto Williams came to the fundraisers and events supporting The Sampson Fund for as long as he could. While he is no longer attending, his generous spirit and love of animals continue to impact hundreds of lives across Cape Cod each year.

“We often think of The Sampson Fund as something that helps animals, but we really hope it helps people just as often,” Dr. Donner says. 

Brooklyn Moore is a freelance writer for Cape Cod Life Publications.