On June 2, 2021, the lounge officially opened to visitors and adopters, and we are celebrating our fourth anniversary this week! A generous donor has offered to match up to $2000 in donations so if you’ve considered donating now would be a great time to do it. You can donate HERE. We have had 198 adoptions in the last four years and are currently caring for 16 cats and kittens in the lounge and foster homes. Over the years we’ve helped cats get the dental care they needed, Solensia injections for arthritis pain, FIP medications, and countless vet visits, vaccinations, spay/neuter surgeries, and microchips. We do our best to care for the cats like they’re our own and provide them with a comfortable living environment at the lounge while they wait to be adopted.
Four years of running the lounge is not all rainbows and sunshine. It’s thousands and thousands of hours of volunteer work every year, feeding and scooping, cleaning, talking with visitors, helping people, reading applications, looking at homes for safety, occasionally getting a kitty returned, keeping up with paperwork and social media, and so much more. Unlike city or county shelters, we do not receive any tax dollars. We rely on visits to the lounge, shopping in our gift shop, adoption fees, and donations to fund our mission. Maintaining a 2000+ square foot space in midtown Ventura does not come cheap, but we found probably the very best deal going at the time and continue to see that our rent is very affordable compared to places currently for lease in our area. Still, it costs roughly $116 a day to keep the lounge running.
All that said, we are so very grateful to our supporters who show their love for cats by helping us care for the ones we take in. Thank you!
The lounge will be closed on Sunday, May 11th for Mother’s Day. We will be open Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday as usual and reservations are required to visit.
For a variety of reasons, we will be moving to an appointment-only system for visiting the lounge. We find that many people who drop in, looking to adopt, do not know what our organization does or how it functions and sometimes leave feeling irritated or angry that we aren’t what they thought. We work hard to be clear on our website what we do, how we do it, and why we do it, and we have systems in place to help ensure that potential adopters have a pleasant and informative experience.
Beginning this week we will no longer accept walk-in visits. We will be displaying signage in our front window, updating the language throughout the website, and sharing the change via social media.
The lobby gift shop will remain open for drop-in shopping and we will always accept donations in the lobby as well. We just want to have a better heads up on visits to expect.