The solution to financial exclusion isn’t more credit products. It’s stronger communities.
I deeply believe in the truth of this statement, and recently I’ve been watching someone prove it.
Her name is Ebony Richardson, founder of the Atlanta Dog Mom Social Club and The Village Pet Project.
Ebony didn’t start with a financial product or a fintech platform. She started with something far more powerful: community.
Atlanta Dog Mom began as a space for dog moms of color, queer dog moms, and anyone else who has ever felt overlooked or excluded from “traditional” pet communities. Ebony created a place where people could connect, share experiences, have fun, and support one another as pet owners. And as that community grew, something important happened. Ebony began to see — clearly and compassionately — the real barriers many loving pet owners face.
When someone struggles to pay a veterinary bill, it’s rarely a matter of irresponsibility or lack of love. More often, it’s something economists call liquidity constraints: the money simply isn’t available at the moment care is needed. Instead of accepting that reality as inevitable, Ebony started building solutions.
First came a pet food pantry to help families keep their animals fed during difficult times. Then she organized community veterinary days, partnering with local clinics to provide low-cost vaccines and spay/neuter services. And now she’s launching something truly exciting: The Village Pet Project — a community-based cost-sharing model that allows members to help one another manage veterinary expenses.
It’s a simple but powerful idea: a community contributes to a shared fund that can be used when members face unexpected veterinary costs. When someone receives help, they can repay the fund over time, allowing the support to circulate through the community.
What makes this model so compelling is that it grows out of relationships and trust, not credit scores.
Trust matters enormously in any shared financial system. It’s why many national peer-to-peer models struggle: they try to scale financial cooperation before trust exists. Ebony built trust first, through years of community leadership and real support. The Village Pet Project is built on that foundation.
And this is where VetBilling fits naturally. Our platform provides the operational infrastructure for structured repayment plans — the “financial plumbing,” if you will — that allows community support systems like this to function sustainably. When members of the Village Pet Project receive assistance, VetBilling manages the repayment process so that funds can continue to circulate and help others.
In other words:
Ebony and her community provide the trust network.
VetBilling provides the structure that keeps the system moving.
Together, that creates something very different from traditional veterinary financing. Credit-based financing companies are not building communities. They’re underwriting individuals. Their systems are designed to evaluate a single borrower in isolation — credit score, income signals, repayment history — and make a yes-or-no decision about whether that person qualifies for financing. Community relationships, shared responsibility, and collective support simply don’t exist in that framework.
Companies like CareCredit and Cherry are designed to facilitate transactions, not relationships. If a pet owner doesn’t meet their underwriting criteria — whether because of thin credit history, a temporary financial setback, or structural inequalities in access to credit — the system simply says no.
Community-based models work differently. Instead of concentrating risk in a single borrower, they distribute responsibility across relationships and shared participation. Members support one another through shared resources and mutual trust, while tools like VetBilling provide the structure that allows that support to function sustainably over time. In a system like this, access to veterinary care isn’t determined only by a credit score. It’s strengthened by community.
And that may be the real path to sustainable access to care — not better credit products, but stronger communities supporting one another.
What Ebony is building in Atlanta is a glimpse of what that future could look like, and I’m incredibly honored that VetBilling can play a small role in helping support it.
If you’re interested in learning more about Ebony’s work, I encourage you to follow Atlanta Dog Mom Social Club and The Village Pet Project on social media. It’s inspiring to witness communities create new pathways to make veterinary care more affordable — and to keep pets with the people who love them.
And if you feel moved by what Ebony and her community are building, consider supporting them with a donation. Initiatives like this grow through the participation of people who believe in them — and every contribution helps expand what’s possible for pets and the families who love them.