Halloween at most public buildings means a bowl of candy and a closed door. At 5585 Sabre Road on the afternoon of Saturday, October 31, 2026, it means a candy table at the front entrance, costumed kids, and a rotating cast of foster dogs who have been living in somebody's spare bedroom for the past several weeks and are ready to be looked at.
The Norfolk Animal Care and Adoption Center's "Meet and Treat" runs from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m., and it is about as low-stakes as an adoption event gets. Humans of all ages are invited to dress up and stop by the trick-or-treat table at the shelter's front entrance. Meanwhile, dogs currently in foster homes will be brought back to the shelter to hang out, and visitors are encouraged to wander into the play areas and meet them.
The premise is simple, but it is built on a piece of sheltering philosophy that has quietly reshaped how the Norfolk center operates over the past several years: the idea that a dog is best evaluated, and best marketed, not in a concrete run but on a couch.
The foster program at NACC has grown into one of the shelter's central tools. Animals that are too young for adoption, recovering from injury, or in need of a different environment go home with volunteers for anywhere from a few days to a few months. The shelter supplies food and bedding; the foster family supplies the one-on-one attention. In early 2019, the center publicly expanded its foster effort specifically for medium and large dogs, with NACC providing food, bowls, crates, toys and any needed medication. The reasoning, as staff explained it at the time, was that shelter housing and rigid schedules can make even well-behaved dogs act out. A house-trained dog may start having accidents in a run. A friendly dog may bark constantly or turn his back when potential adopters walk past.
One dog described by staff in that period barked often in the shelter and refused to engage with visitors, then went home with a foster and turned into a playful, sociable animal who bonded with the foster's five-year-old. Another, a puppy seized from an owner after abuse that required a leg amputation, was fostered by a kennel supervisor and found an adoptive family within days. A third arrived as a stray terrified of its own shadow and stayed in foster care until it met a five-year-old girl; the two became instant best friends.
That is the case for an event like Meet and Treat. A dog met in a kennel is a dog seen through chain link, often at its most anxious. A dog met in a play yard, on a Saturday afternoon, with children in costumes drifting past and somebody handing out candy, is a dog behaving more or less like a dog. The foster families who bring their charges back for the afternoon are, in effect, providing references.
The center itself is the City of Norfolk's open-admission shelter, which means it does not turn animals away. On average it cares for 400 to 600 animals a month and more than 5,000 a year, a volume that makes volunteer labor and foster homes less of a nice-to-have than a structural necessity. The city covers the basics -- housing, feeding, initial vaccinations -- but the margin between basic care and adoption-ready is where the nonprofit Friends of Norfolk Animal Care Center operates.
That organization's origin story is a modest one. In 2005, a small group of citizens banded together with the goal of paying for additional medical care for animals in the city shelter, and they started with a $750 donation. The fund grew, more people got involved, and in 2008 the group formally became Friends of Norfolk Animal Care Center. What began with a six-member board now runs on a fourteen-member board, a network of volunteers, and an annual operating budget approaching $100,000, all of it directed back to the shelter and the community. FNACC money underwrites medical procedures, sponsors spay and neuter programs, stocks a Pet Pantry, markets adoption events, and helps fund the foster program for the shelter's most vulnerable animals.
Volunteers, meanwhile, remain the engine. NACC asks prospective volunteers to attend an orientation and fill out an application, and it matches foster animals to a volunteer's lifestyle and schedule rather than the other way around. The shelter has said it is always looking for additional foster homes, with the greatest need in spring and summer, the busiest intake months of the year.
Which is part of why an October event matters. By Halloween, the summer flood of kittens and puppies has eased, but the dogs are still there, and the ones in foster care are the shelter's best ambassadors precisely because they have already proven they can live in a home. Meet and Treat is, functionally, a recruitment drive disguised as a party -- for adopters, certainly, but also for the next round of foster families who might watch a dog trot across a play yard and think, I could do that.
The shelter sits at 5585 Sabre Road in Norfolk, an easy drive from most of Norfolk and neighboring Virginia Beach. The event runs two hours, 2:30 to 4:30 p.m., on Saturday, October 31, 2026. Costumes are encouraged for humans of all ages. Candy is at the front entrance. The dogs, and the people who have been keeping them, will be in the play areas.
For anyone who has been meaning to get involved with the shelter but has not gotten around to filling out the paperwork, it is a reasonable excuse to show up in a sheet with eye holes cut in it and ask a few questions. For anyone simply looking for a place to take a child trick-or-treating that is not another parking lot, it is that too -- with the added possibility of coming home with a dog.