27 Nov 2020

Feeling Thankful

by | posted in: Education, Fostering, Fundraising | 0

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!

15 Nov 2020

Pop-Up Shop November 21st

by | posted in: Fundraising, Just for Fun | 0

We will be hosting a pop-up shop fundraising event on Saturday, November 21, from 11 am – 3 pm. It will be an outdoor event, held on the driveway at 2593 Poli St., Ventura. Everything in our fundraising shop (toys, masks, jewelry, notecards) will be available plus a couple of new handmade cat beds, new knit catnip hearts, and some masks made up in new prints that haven’t been listed in our shop.

This is also a chance to come by and say hello and introduce yourself if you’re hoping to visit or volunteer in the future, and it’s a chance to learn more about the organization and our plans.

Masks and physical distancing will be required. Cash, checks, and credit/debit cards will all be accepted. Rain or heavy wind may cancel the event.

We hope to see you there! Details also on our Facebook page.

Pop Up Shop Banner
4 Nov 2020

November Updates

by | posted in: Education, Fundraising | 0

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:

  1. We’ve had 64 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 $3600 in there.
  3. We’ve sold at least 94 masks since August.
  4. We have over 300 Facebook followers and over 330 Instagram followers.
  5. We’ve fostered 15 cats and kittens.
  6. We’ve had 2 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’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:

  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!