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Interview! Ann Dunn, Founder of Cat Town, Oakland, CA

"Nobody wanted to be standing in a cafe making coffee, they wanted to be helping the cats. But now, we’re seeing how helpful it has been to forgotten kittens and see how successful it has been."

Ann Dunn founded Cat Town, which is a cat rescue organization focusing on helping the most vulnerable cats in local shelters. Cats that are too scared in that environment have a hard time showing their best selves and soon tend to be overlooked by potential adopters. After realizing this, she wanted to work with these cats that needed the most intervention and save them from being euthanized. She opened the first Cat Cafe in conjunction with Cat Town in 2014 and just opened an adoption center for the hardest to place cats.

She worked for over 20 years in public housing redevelopment in managing, funding and planning. While she didn’t grow up with cats, she did end up adopting 2 cats after college. It was in their memory that she started volunteering at the local animal shelter. She never imagined it would lead her to open her own rescue shelter and she soon became obsessed with helping cats. In this new venture, she saw opportunity to apply her professional skills to address the high euthanasia rate she saw with the higher risk cats who weren’t having luck find homes. In 2011, Oakland had a 42% euthanasia rate, but by focusing on cats most likely to be euthanized, she has helped place around 1,800 cats and reduced the euthanasia rate to 14%!

Ann brought a different perspective to the problem when looking at the variables that were in play at an animal shelter. She saw obstacles that were in place that prevented some cats from feeling safe enough to be confident, which in turn, led them to not be adopted and often times, euthanized. Instead, she wanted to find a way to help by finding a way to place these cats in something other than a cage, where people could get to see them open up more. She originally was thinking this would happen in the form of a quasi sanctuary/adoption center/ cat cafe, so people would be able to spend time with these types of cats in an easier environment for the animals. She wanted to see these troubled cats find a “safe place” where they would transform into confident cats that people would want to adopt.

She now works on the Forgotten Kitten Project, as well. She uses a different approach with kittens that come in who may not be socialized because they are a little older. She brings them in and lets them become desensitized to an active environment, where they are amazingly resilient. It helps boost their confidence and gives them the skills they need to become more adoptable cats. She received a grant from Maddie’s Fund for this, where she documents her findings in order to hopefully inspire other organizations to do the same thing and replicate this approach elsewhere.

Ann also participates in an apprenticeship program through Maddie’s Fun, where she shares innovative ideas with other organizations. Cat Town is a host organization, where they have different organizations come in and shadow them, to see how they are doing things and what they can do to implement their ideas and success in their own organizations.

Find out Ann’s thoughts on the Cat Cafe and what she would do differently if she had to do it again. Would she even open a cat cafe if she was starting all over?

Learn more at www.cattownoakland.org

Steve Lawrence, an award-winning filmmaker previously interviewed by Stacy on CCP Episode 178, returns to CCP to discuss the documentary film he co-directed, The Cat Rescuers. The film premiered in October 2018 at the Hamptons International Film Festival, where it won an award for “giving voice to the voiceless.”

Since then, Steve and his production company have set about making the film available for community screenings that can be used as fundraisers for rescue and TNR groups. This can be done either directly through the filmmakers, or through an online platform called Tugg, which will take care of the logistical details for you.

Steve tells Stacy that his intention with this film was to make something that would help raise awareness about TNR and adoptions. One of the other points of the film was to make the point that much of this work that is being done to help cats is done on a volunteer basis and that the groups around the country need ways to sustain themselves. Steve hopes that the film allows people to raise awareness in their own communities about what it takes to do this kind of work, and also about why and how TNR is effective.

“Our intention was to make a film that would be of use to the rescue community not only in the U.S. but around the world—but we also wanted to make a film that would be emotionally engaging and sufficiently entertaining that it would grab an average viewer who’s just looking for a good story, for an interesting story with compelling characters—and I think we’ve achieved both.”

To learn more about The Cat Rescuers, including where/how to attend or host a screening, visit the film’s website. To host a screening where the details (like finding a location and ticket sales) are all taken care of for you, go can go through Tugg’s online booking interface.

Gary Willoughby, the President and CEO of the SPCA Serving Erie County in West Seneca, New York, joins Stacy to talk about what’s going on at the nation’s second oldest humane society. A passionate life-long learner, Gary joined the SPCA in 2016, after several animal welfare roles, as well as several roles in other fields.

Among other topics, Gary talks with Stacy about the SPCA’s full-service wildlife clinic, and how having that clinic alongside a more traditional animal shelter has informed both the SPCA’s work with and data collection around cats and trap-neuter-vaccinate-return programs. Over the years, Gary tells us, they have been able to measure the successful impact of local TNVR programs through decreased intakes into the shelter, as well as through a decrease in the number of wild animals brought into the wildlife clinic with cat-related injuries.

The SPCA Serving Erie County is big on education, including helping folks understand why just feeding stray or feral cats is only the first step (and then helping them find a way to make that next step happen). “It’s so easy to love animals and just to put out some food and water for a cat,” Gary says, “but taking the next steps, there’s always barriers in the way.” One of the ways Gary hopes to continue removing those barriers in the future is by adding a transportation component to their partnership with a local high-quality, high-volume spay/neuter clinic. He believes that this will make spay/neuter more accessible to people in more rural parts of the county.

Above all, Gary believes that groups must collaborate to come up with a strategic plan to improve communities together. “No one person or group can do it alone,” he tells us, and he recommends getting to know – and then getting together regularly with – other groups in your area to discuss what’s working, and putting your heads together to come up with new solutions as well.

To learn more about the work being done at the SPCA Serving Erie County, visit yourspca.org, or check them out on Twitter or Facebook.