This time last year we were ready to start forming the nonprofit but hadn’t even started a draft of our bylaws, an essential first step. We weren’t approved as a legitimate 501(c)3 nonprofit organization until March of this year (with approval dating back to early January). Here we are now in November, and we have come a long way for a very new nonprofit organization trying to fundraise during a worldwide pandemic and various stages of a state shutdown here in California!
A few encouraging statistics:
- We’ve had 64 people (that we know of!) support us through financial donations, participating in fundraisers, and/or in-kind donations.
- We started with seed money of $130 the day we opened our bank account and now have about $3600 in there.
- We’ve sold at least 94 masks since August.
- We have over 300 Facebook followers and over 330 Instagram followers.
- We’ve fostered 15 cats and kittens.
- We’ve had 2 newspaper interviews.
- 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’d like to make a big push and raise $3000 between now and 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:
- Use the yellow PayPal button at the bottom of any page
- Mail a check (use the contact form for our current mailing address)
- Send us a donation through Venmo (Jennifer-Thompson-75)
- Make a purchase in our fundraising shop
As always, thank you for your continued support as we work to make this dream a reality!