Each year, I like to summarize our year to show the awesome work all of the volunteers do to help save our cats and how important every volunteer shift is. This year, I’m sharing it with not just our volunteers but with everyone who supports Cat Tales.
This was a much different year with COVID-19 and we had to pivot quite a bit with our adoption process. A special shout out to the adoption team and the fosters; they really had to step it up and work really hard to reinvent how we get our cats and kittens adopted, getting good Petfinder posts up, including social media posts, and all of the special arrangements that needed to be made to accommodate a safe way for folks to meet the kitties in foster care. It was a difficult and frustrating time, but it was all worth it in the end.
This year Cat Tales was able to help just over 500 cats through adoption and trap-neuter-return (TNR), an increase of about 100 over last year! We’ve sent over 300 cats and kittens to forever homes, an increase of about 70 cats from last year. This is huge in any year, but especially considering the constraints put on us by COVID-19.
We were also thrilled that we got a few volunteer trappers this year, enabling us to include more TNR when we can, which is a less-glamorous, but critically important part of cat rescue. (Reminder: please spay and neuter your pets!)
Our adoption fee income covered 38.5 percent of our medical expenses for both routine and special medical and emergency care. As you can see, that’s a 61.5 percent gap we had to make up. I don’t know how we did it this year with COVID-19 and our inability to do the fundraising we normally do, but we managed to cover all of our expenses this year. PHEW!!
Another exciting development this year was that we added the Four Paws Thrift Store, which has been a great addition and success so far. The volunteers at the Thrift Store work tirelessly to process all of the donations and get them out on the floor to sell. The store will be able to help fund more TNR in our area which is greatly needed.
I can’t thank everyone enough for what they do to help us manage this rescue and help the cats. From helping with incoming phone calls, thank you notes, training new volunteers, scooping boxes, dealing with the public, trapping, fostering, transporting, processing apps, social media, adoptions, collecting donations for the store, thrift store volunteers, and I’m sure there is more… I always say it takes a village to help these kitties and we really do have such a great team. We faced a lot of challenges this year and I’m grateful for every single person that helped us save more kitties.
And, of course, a very special thank you to the wonderful adopters who provided our beloved cats and kittens with forever homes, as well as to the many amazing and generous people who donated money and supplies to help us care for the kitties (remember that 61.5 percent gap mentioned above?!)
I hope everyone has a safe and Happy New Year and I look forward to working together to save more kitties in 2021!
– Carrie
