Goathouse Refuge

Open letter to our friends and sustainers, as we look to the future of the Goathouse Refuge as well as its present well-being. 

As a Goathouse friend and donor you are a very important part of the Goathouse Refuge and your unwavering support during this challenging time continues to inspire each of us who love the cats and the unique mission of the Goathouse Refuge. We cannot thank you enough for all that you do to help support the daily feeding cleaning and care of the cats who live temporarily, or perhaps forever, at the Goathouse.

What makes the Goathouse Refuge so different from other animal shelters and rescues, is the unique environment for the cats that find their way to the Goathouse. Not only are the immediate physical needs of the cats and kittens cared for, their longer-term health and socialization are also critical to ensure they can find their forever homes. For cats that are not adoptable, the Goathouse Refuge serves as their comfortable forever home, where they can live out their years enjoying being cats … not clustered in cages or euthanized because no one wants them.

Because of its careful nurturing environment, the Goathouse requires more space, more labor and more veterinary costs that comparable shelters and rescues. The particular group of sustainer donors, who donate a fixed amount each month, is critical to ensure a stable level of funding to meet these needs. Through this group’s generous commitments, we cover nearly 18% of the total normal monthly fixed costs for our cat care, with the remainder coming from your Individual donations, fundraising, grants, and other large infrequent donations. As for many organizations, this year has been difficult and eye opening for us. During the first weeks of pandemic, there were days when we thought we might not be able to secure pet food, fix a broken water well pump and pay for other daily expenses. Thankfully through donors like you, we have managed to keep going. More often than not, each week has been a struggle to ensure we can pay the bills for the week. But something very positive has happened from this; we have been driven to more action.

For the past 22 years Siglinda Scarpa has been a pillar of the Goathouse Refuge. Not only is she there seven days a week loving the cats and supervising their care, but she is also central in much of the fundraising, and with individual donations in particular. The disruption in donations caused by the pandemic and the knowledge that the Goathouse Refuge must be prepared to continue without Siglinda one day, has driven us to focus on how to ensure there will be a more regular and dependable monthly flow of funds to cover the labor to feed the cats and to clean the cat enclosures and administer medicines.

The goal of the 2020 Goathouse Refuge Cat Security Campaign is to go from the current monthly sustainer coverage of 18% of the minimum basic monthly cost to feed and care for the cats to 100%. This will provide a dependable source of monthly funding to cover the basic monthly costs to feed the cats, pay for and administer their medicines clean the spaces and enclosures, and utilities. We will still need to continue to rely on single donations and other fundraising efforts to cover the considerable funds need for veterinary, spay/neutering, taxes, licenses, maintenance and repair, capital projects etc.

This letter serves as our official start of the 2020 Goathouse Refuge Security Campaign. Over the next several months, we plan to send out emails, post stories on the Behind the Scene of our web site, and post and share stories on our social media sites to help demonstrate why this sustained level of planned giving to the Goathouse is critical to fulfilling the Goathouse Refuge’s special mission.

We would encourage all our current sustainers to increase their generous monthly donations and former sustainers to consider giving again. For our other donors, adopters, and supporters, we invite you to help continue to support the Goathouse Refuge mission by becoming a sustainer.

These are challenging times as we start this major Sustainer campaign to ensure the security of the Goathouse Refuge’s special mission. We hope you can help in reaching our goal by increasing your monthly sustainer contributions. You can also help tremendously by letting your friends, family, and other animal lovers you know about the Goathouse Refuge and the special work it is doing and asking if they would consider becoming a sustainer or supporting our mission. So please share this letter. (Each cat needs on average $31 per month for just food, litter, medications, and veterinary care. With the costs to care for the cats, this can come to over $100 per month per cat. Add in the staffing costs this nearly $150 per cat per month!)

Purrfectly yours,

Helena Openshaw and Jeff Vojta
2020 Cat Security Sustainers Campaign Committee