Hi everyone. I made a post asking about this kind of thing a while ago and several people reached out to say "hey please do this I want to help" so.
I'll try not to ramble but I want to be as transparent as possible! So, I volunteer with a local cat group. The primary function is low-cost spay and neuter services. We have clinics about once a month that I help at, in the mornings and afternoons, where about 30-50 cats are fixed and vaccinated. We also participate with TNR programs, but primarily assist people in our community with their pets.
I do fostering. I post about it on Bluesky. I take cats into my own home usually under pretty urgent circumstances and hold them until they can be fixed, and adopted out. I have so far exclusively fostered female cats, and about half of them have been either pregnant, or nursing mothers. More than one has been a fragile medical case where either the mother, or several of the kittens, were very underweight and needed to be nursed back to health. One of these situations was both.
In a perfect world, a foster organization would provide absolutely everything I need. We do not live in that world. I work part-time at a Big Pet Store (in addition to my full-time work-from-home job) and get a very nice discount on things, so I'm spending a decent amount of my own money to get food, litter, and specialty supplies like KMR or expensive very high-calorie food to help these animals. It is not putting me in any kind of financial distress, and I make enough money to support myself and my own animals, but, it is my own money I'm spending. And people have asked if they can support me.
I do not need large amounts of money. The organization covers the large vet bills through community donations. But, for me, $5 here and there will go very very far in supporting my own fosters and being able to go above and beyond for them (extra wet food, rotating toys, maybe even cat FURNITURE for my foster room, etc).
If you would like to support my foster endeavors, you can donate to my Ko-Fi page.
Please don't feel any pressure to do so if you're struggling at all (I know we all kinda are), but sharing would be super cool. I really appreciate the people who reached out to me who offered help. It's something I always feel really uncomfortable accepting because I'm usually Doing Alright, but being completely honest means admitting that extra money would be great, especially with kitten season beginning. If I get any kind of excess funds, they will become general donations to the organization I volunteer with (though, often, I'm told to keep the money myself to buy supplies! I'm considered a very valuable foster to the organization and only turn down cases if I literally don't have physical room).
Thank you all for the support!! Here are my current sweet foster babies with their mama! They are one week old today!
