Welcome, Pandora!

posted in: Fostering | 0

We took in a sweet mama-to-be named Pandora yesterday. She was living outside in Santa Paula with no microchip or identification, and she’s probably at least 6 weeks pregnant. She’s safe inside now! We’re guessing she’s due in 2-3 weeks with at least 3 kittens. For now she can relax, eat plenty of healthy food, be doted on, and get ready to be a good mom. She’ll be spayed and available for adoption once her kittens are weaned. She is a total sweetheart so we’re all hoping she gets to go home to a loving family as soon as she’s ready.

February Updates

Things seem to be off to a good start for 2021. Storm and Cloud have been adopted, and we’re working to get Hurricane and Rain into their forever homes. Maybe even together, if we can! We’ve toured four retail spaces with feelers out for a couple more. One in particular would be great as long as the money is there month in and month out to pay the bills. It’s spacious and light and purrfect for a cat lounge. Wish we had a crystal ball to tell us what our future holds! We have faith that we’ll get the right place at the right time, that visitors and adopters will come, and that the support we need will be there! Once we’ve been open we should be able to pursue grants, too.

We set a goal to raise $1000/month through in-kind and financial donations and so far things are going well there. We’ve had fabric donated which has been terrific. A fat quarter usually makes 4 masks. Depending on the print, we can get upwards of 16 masks from a full yard of fabric. We’re looking at new fabrics to line the masks with and the possibility of adding a filter pocket.

We’ve sold a few pouches already and have a pattern we like now for a smaller pouch. Just need to get some sewn up! If the weather continues to be sunny, and if COVID-19 cases continue to drop, we may hold another pop-up shop in the next month or so.

In the near future we will be adding some education pages to the website, things like what to expect when you bring a new cat home, how to introduce animals, what’s normal for kitten behavior, etc. if you have suggestions for other topics we’d love to hear them!

As always, thank you for your support. Without supporters we wouldn’t be able to pursue this dream of helping more cats find safe, loving, permanent homes. 💗

December Updates

It’s kind of hard to believe the final month of 2020 is here. I know January of 2021 won’t magically be all better but I have hope that overall, 2021 will be better than 2020!

Some updates to the data I like to track:

  1. We’ve had 70 people (that we know of!) support us through financial donations, participating in fundraisers, and/or in-kind donations.
  2. We started with seed money of $130 the day we opened our bank account and now have about $5400 in there.
  3. We’ve sold at least 125 masks since August.
  4. We have over 350 Facebook followers and over 350 Instagram followers.
  5. We’ve fostered 19 cats and kittens.
  6. We’ve had 3 newspaper interviews.
  7. We’ve spoken to 1 volunteer mentor from SCORE and 1 commercial real estate broker for advice as we move forward.

So what’s to come? We’re making a big push to raise $3000 by the end of the year. Donations to Cassie’s Cats are tax-deductible so we hope our supporters will consider that as they make end-of-year donations. We need our mission to be shared with others in Ventura and the surrounding communities as well as further out, to anyone who shares our values and wants to see cats and kittens finding their “fur”ever homes! Rent in midtown Ventura is not cheap but we want to be visible and attract as many visitors and potential adopters as we can.

Ways to donate:

  1. Use the yellow PayPal button at the bottom of any page
  2. Mail a check (use the contact form for our current mailing address)
  3. Send us a donation through Venmo (Jennifer-Thompson-75)
  4. Make a purchase in our fundraising shop

As always, thank you for your continued support as we work to make this dream a reality!

Feeling Thankful

It’s the day after Thanksgiving and I wanted to take a few moments to say thank you. Storm is doing well, eating a lot, recovering from her surgery, and looking after her babies. Rain, Cloud, and Hurricane are one-week old today and doing fantastic. They’re gaining weight just as they should be and look like healthy, roly-poly kittens. I’m grateful for that. I’ve been posting photos on Instagram and Facebook.

Our fundraiser last weekend went really well and brought in almost $400. There are lots of new masks out in the community now and several kitties got new toys to play with. Two former fosters even got the two crocheted cat beds! My daughter is home now (and is also a board member) so together we may do one more pop-up for a couple of hours on December 12th. Stay tuned for details about that. Chris Frost wrote up a nice article about us and the event, too.

We’ve been pushing to bring our total fundraising up to $10,000 by year’s end so that we’re more than ready to launch our retail space as soon as it’s safe to do so. As of today, we have a little over $5500 in the bank and in cash and another $1650 promised to us. We’re hoping that one donor’s $1000 donation will be matched by their employer. All said, that would bring us to about $8000! That is so amazing and we are humbled and inspired by the support and generosity shown by our community.

Thank you for supporting us, for following us, and for helping our dream come true. We can’t wait to open our space and start helping more cats find their furever homes!