The Community Cats Podcast

"It's okay to be small and grassroots."
This episode is sponsored-in-part by Maddie's Fund, OcuTrap, and The Community Cat Clinic.
Robyn Alcock and Jen Scott joined host Stacy LeBaron to talk about Feral Fixers TNR Club, the Jersey City nonprofit they co-founded in 2024 alongside Kathryn Parker after years of trapping independently. In just two years, the all-volunteer group — who all keep full-time jobs — has helped more than 375 cats through TNR, rescue, and medical care. Much of the conversation centered on the realities of running a small "operational board" nonprofit: the governance lessons that shaped their early structure, why they held off on setting formal growth metrics in year one, and how nearly half of the cats they trap turn out to be friendly, adoptable animals rather than TNR candidates — a shift driven largely by the lack of low-cost spay/neuter access in Jersey City.
Stacy, Robyn, and Jen also dug into practical solutions: MASH-style pop-up clinic models from groups like Animal Balance and Slomba Shelter Solutions as ways to bring high-volume spay/neuter directly into underserved neighborhoods, and the fundraising path that took Feral Fixers from small individual donors to their first Mission Meow grant and a matching grant from United Spay Alliance's Community Cats Grants program at their two-year mark. It's a useful blueprint for any small, grassroots group trying to prove — as Robyn puts it — that it's okay to be small.
Press Play Now For:
How a pandemic-era trapping experience and a childhood spent bottle-feeding strays led Robyn and Jen to co-found a Jersey City nonprofit
Practical governance lessons for small, "operational board" nonprofits — board size, conflicts of interest, and keeping personal and organizational finances separate
Why nearly half of Feral Fixers' TNR trapping efforts turn into friendly-cat rescues, and how that's reshaping their workload
The transportation and appointment-access barriers keeping Jersey City residents from affordable spay/neuter
MASH-style clinic models, including Animal Balance, as an option for bringing spay/neuter directly into underserved communities
How Feral Fixers built its funding base through small donors, a Mission Meow grant, and a United Spay Alliance matching grant
Stacy's framework for identifying and cultivating leadership-level donors as an organization grows
Why "altered at intake" numbers matter for understanding a community's real spay/neuter gap
Resources & Links
Feral Fixers TNR Club: https://feralfixersclub.org/
Feral Fixers TNR Club on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/feralfixersclub/
United Spay Alliance Community Cats Grants: https://www.unitedspayalliance.org/community-cats-grants/
Animal Balance: https://www.animalbalance.org/
Slomba Shelter Solutions: https://slombasheltersolutions.com/

"It's about knowing your limits, knowing where you are energy-wise, time-wise, resource-wise, and just doing what you can — and knowing that is enough, and that is making a difference."
This episode is sponsored-in-part by Maddie's Fund, OcuTrap, and Neighborhood Cats TNR Certification Workshop.
Jen Blough returns to the podcast after nearly a decade away — she was featured in the show's first fifty episodes — to talk about the work she's built in the years since: helping animal welfare professionals name and navigate the emotional toll of the field. A licensed professional counselor, former shelter worker and animal control officer, and lifelong animal advocate, Jen didn't set out to specialize in compassion fatigue. She backed into it in grad school, when a professor described the symptoms of secondary traumatic stress and she realized he was describing her own life.
Much of the conversation is spent untangling terms that get used interchangeably but aren't the same thing. Jen breaks down compassion fatigue as the combination of burnout (which comes from your environment — under-resourced organizations, systemic failures, day-to-day friction) and secondary traumatic stress (which comes from absorbing someone else's trauma, human or animal). She walks through how moral distress and moral injury fit in — the no-good-options decisions that TNR caregivers and shelter workers face constantly — and why none of these, despite how real they feel, show up in the DSM.
The back half of the conversation turns to grief, and this is where the discussion gets specific to community cat work. Jen introduces two concepts: disenfranchised grief (loss that society doesn't validate, which often includes animal loss) and ambiguous loss (grief without closure — not knowing what happened to a cat who stops showing up at a colony). Stacy and Jen talk through the real tension caregivers face around outdoor cats aging out of a colony, and how organizations can handle transparency with volunteers about euthanasia and loss without either traumatizing them or leaving them in the dark. Jen closes with practical advice on knowing your limits and recognizing that showing up in smaller ways — a donation, a shared post, a bag of food — still counts as meaningful advocacy.
Press Play Now For:
The real difference between burnout, compassion fatigue, secondary traumatic stress, moral distress, and moral injury
Why compassion fatigue isn't a diagnosable condition, and how it can fluctuate day to day
Disenfranchised grief and why animal loss so often gets dismissed by people outside the field
Ambiguous loss — the particular grief of not knowing what happened to a cat who never returns to the feeding station
How organizations can navigate telling (or not telling) volunteers about euthanasia and cat loss
Jen's advice for recognizing your capacity and letting "not right now" be an acceptable answer
A first look at Jen's forthcoming book and new certification program for animal welfare professionals
Resources & Links
Jen Blough's website
Beyond Compassion Fatigue: Trauma, Resilience, and Recovery in Animal Care and Advocacy — pre-order
To Save a Starfish: A Compassion Fatigue Workbook for the Animal Welfare Warrior
Beyond Compassion Fatigue podcast

"There's not a lot of that — you don't really hear about cat parks or cat meetups. So I wanted to try and change that."
This episode is sponsored-in-part by Maddie's Fund, OcuTrap, and The Community Cat Clinic.
Darein Gray never set out to build a pet-industry platform — he's an IT guy by trade, working in data and business analytics. But when he noticed there was no real gathering space for cat people the way there is for dog people, he taught himself the tools to build one. What started as a solo passion project has grown into Paw-Events.com, a free directory now covering 60-plus U.S. cities, connecting cat and dog lovers with adoption days, spay/neuter clinics, rescue fundraisers, cat cafés, and community meetups in one searchable place.
Host Stacy LeBaron and Darein dig into how the platform actually works for TNR and community cat programs specifically — not just the bake-sale-and-fun-run events people usually picture. Organizations running mobile spay/neuter clinics, trapping events, or vaccination and microchipping days can list by city and neighborhood, filtered so people can find exactly what's happening near them. Darein talks through how smaller grassroots groups, which often don't have the advertising muscle of a PAWS or a Humane Society, can get the same visibility as the big names — and how individuals, not just organizations, are welcome to list events too, after a basic vetting process.
The conversation also covers the platform's education side (ESA and service animal resources, vaccination info, cat training events), its city-hub structure and how organic communities form within bigger metro areas, and Darein's openness to expanding into new states and regions when local advocates reach out. For anyone doing outreach for a workshop, clinic, or trapping event, this episode is a look at a free tool built specifically to solve the "how do we get the word out" problem.
Press Play Now For:
How Paw-Events.com works as a free, searchable directory for cat and dog events across 60+ U.S. cities
Why the platform is built for TNR events, spay/neuter clinics, and microchipping days — not just adoption fairs
How smaller rescues and individual organizers can list events alongside big-name organizations
The vetting process for individuals who want to post their own events
How city "hubs" and grassroots communities naturally form on the platform
What to do if you want your city or state added to the platform
The educational resources available, including ESA/service animal info and cat training events
Resources & Links
Paw-Events.com Website
Paw-Event.com's Facebook
Paw-Event.com's Instagram
Paw-Event.com's TikTok

"The environment we build around a cat shapes her outcome more than any single intervention we can ever make."
his episode is sponsored-in-part by Maddie's Fund, OcuTrap, and The Community Cat Clinic.
Jodi Belongié has spent more than 25 years in animal welfare and shelter medicine, driven by a question that traces back to age 14, when she talked her way into fostering an abandoned pregnant cat with no rescue to call. That instinct — that the systems cats need don't have to already exist, you can build them — led her to co-found the Chico Cat Café in 2021, which became the proving ground for what she calls the SAFE framework: an original behavioral welfare model, developed through the UC Davis Koret Shelter Medicine Program, that reframes adoption assessment around a single question — not "is this cat adoptable?" but "is this environment giving her a fair chance to show us who she is?"
 
Jodi and Stacey dig into what that looked like in practice: the café's deliberately home-like design, hard caps on capacity (never more than 12–14 cats, nine visitors an hour), and a rescue-based intake process built to get cats settled before they ever meet an adopter. The conversation widens into Jodi's vision for community cat management's next chapter — small, replicable hubs that go beyond adoption into trap depots, spay/neuter access, and food pantries, especially in the rural and under-resourced areas philanthropy tends to overlook. That's the mission behind The CATS Foundation, launching spring 2027.
 
Press Play Now For:
 
The origin story behind Jodi's decades in animal welfare — and why she says "the credential has always been secondary to the question"

What the SAFE framework is and how it reframes adoption assessment around environment instead of the cat

Inside the design choices behind Chico Cat Café's home-like, non-industrial space

The capacity-for-care numbers Jodi holds firm on, and why more cats than people is intentional

How SAFE's underlying philosophy already shows up in the work of colony managers, TNR practitioners, and foster coordinators

Jodi's vision for a "2.0" model of small, replicable community cat hubs — and why she believes it should start small

The mission behind The CATS Foundation and its spring 2027 launch

 
Resources & Links:
 
Jodi's Substack, The Outpost Observer: https://pawsitiveparadigm.substack.com/

Jodi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jodibelongiervt/

 
Editor's note: Since this conversation was recorded, Jodi has closed Chico Cat Café, paused The CATS Foundation, and consolidated her cats-centric consulting and publishing work under Nine Lives Strategies.

This episode is sponsored-in-part by Maddie's Fund, OcuTrap, and The Community Cat Clinic.
Corinne Bourgoin returns to the podcast five years after her first appearance, and the numbers show what's changed: the MSPCA Boston Adoption Center's return-to-home rate for cats hit 33% in 2025, more than six times the roughly 5% national average. She draws a careful distinction between "return to owner" and "return to home" — sometimes a cat goes back to one caretaker, sometimes to a neighborhood that's been caring for it collectively — and traces the results back to a mindset shift: assume every stray has someone looking for it, and treat reunification as the shelter's job, not just the owner's.
From there, Corinne gets practical. A dedicated, well-followed Facebook page puts stray photos in front of the neighborhoods cats actually came from. For microchipped cats, she doesn't stop at the manufacturer's registry — she cross-checks petmicrochiplookup.com for the most current database, then follows up with whoever implanted the chip. She also shares how anyone can do this detective work before a cat ever reaches a shelter: neighbor conversations, Nextdoor and community Facebook posts, flyers, and "paper collars" — a strip of paper taped around a friendly cat's neck asking, "Is this your cat?" Technology like AirTags helps, but she's clear it's only half the equation; the other half is neighbors staying present in their own communities.
The conversation turns to ear tips and how "community cat" has shifted from a behavioral judgment call to a population-risk one — any unaltered outdoor cat, tipped or not. Corinne's years at Maui Humane Society gave that shift real stakes: during the Maui wildfires, more than 600 cats survived the burn zone, many already sterilized and ear-tipped, which meant no kitten boom compounding the recovery. She closes with Tiger, a geriatric cat who arrived at the shelter after five years missing — his microchip led her to an owner who'd long given up hope, and he walked straight to the cabinet where his food bowl used to sit.
Press Play Now For:
Why "return to home" is a more accurate goal than "return to owner" — and how MSPCA hit a 33% reunification rate for cats
A step-by-step walkthrough of tracking down an owner through microchip databases, including why the manufacturer's registry often isn't the most current one
Low-tech tools anyone can use to reunite a found cat with its family, from paper collars to Nextdoor posts
How the definition of "community cat" has evolved from a behavioral call to a population-management one
How more than 600 ear-tipped, sterilized cats survived the Maui wildfires without a kitten population boom
The story of Tiger, reunited with his family five years after going missing
Resources & Links
MSPCA-Angell
Pet Microchip Lookup
Return-to-Home Certification Workshop (Community Cats Central)
Contact Corinne: lostpet@mspca.org