Interview! Olivia Westley, Development Director for Forgotten Cats, Inc.

“Anything is possible, and I hope that there can be a lot more organizations like Forgotten Cats in this world.”

Olivia Westley, a former teacher who discovered her true passion for helping cats when she started volunteering in a Forgotten Cats pet store adoption center, now serves as the group’s Development Director. Forgotten Cats is a nonprofit organization with the mission of preventing the birth and suffering of unwanted kittens by controlling the free-roaming cat pop through TNVR. They provide free or low-cost sterilization for pet and free-roaming cats in Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, and they have sterilized over 110,000 cats since they were founded in 2003.

The organization began as a “one-woman show,” with the founder, Felicia Cross, trapping and transporting feral cats herself, and holding them in her garage until surgery spaces were available. Felicia found that her biggest challenge was the availability of surgery slots, and so she decided to start her own group to tackle the problem. Today, Forgotten Cats has three clinic facilities (two in Pennsylvania, and a new one in Delaware), as well as eleven adoption centers inside pet stores through the Pennsylvania-Delaware-Maryland-New Jersey area. Their clinics have tons of space for holding traps pre- and post-surgery (up to 100 traps at a time!). This allows the organization to trap an entire colonies at once for TNR.

Forgotten Cats is funded by the fees from their adoptions and other services, as well as by grants from various private foundations. The group has over 700 volunteers, a number that Olivia attributes to their presence in such a wide geographical area, as well as to the visibility of their adoption centers in so many pet stores.

To learn more about Forgotten Cats and the work they do, visit forgottencats.org.

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