Holiday See's Candy -

Great Holiday gifts for friends and co-workers while raising money for our cats!
Come down and buy a 1 pound boxes of assorted chocolates for $15.70 and/or one of the Mini-Holiday Fancy Boxes for $6.00.
These are available after Nov. 23 at the Feline Well-Care Clinic, 1683 Broadway Street, Redwood City.

Nine Lives Foundation chosen as 

"Romeo the Cat’s" November FURPOWER beneficiary

thanks to all of you!

Support the fund drive & spread the word around the world...

If you don’t know 'Romeo the Cat', you should. This fundraising cat has raised more than $25K for animal shelters and rescues across the United States. This month, Nine Lives is the beneficiary of his efforts - we received more votes than any other rescue in the history of Romeo's website! 

Way to go, all you supporters of Nine Lives!

Romeo raises money through his blog at http://www.romeothecat.com, through Twitter (@romeothecat), and through his corporate sponsors: Wellness Pet Food, Feline Pine cat litter, FURminator deShedding Tools, Sea-Yu Enterprises, makers of Clean + Green pet products, Big Paw Designs, and Petwebdesigner.com

Romeo is also offers “Rescue Mom” and “Rescue Dad” cat magnets & stickers ranging from $6 to $9.50. The proceeds from the sale of each item range from $2.50 to $4.00 and it will all go to Nine Lives this month. You can see the magnets & stickers at: http://www.romeothecat.com/products-page/

There will also be some other incentives for those who donate, including: for every $1 you donate to Nine Lives through Romeo’s website, you’ll get one chance to win one of four $25 Petco gift cards. So if you donate $5 you’ll get 5 chances and so forth.

This is where you go 

to make your donation:

http://www.romeothecat.com/donate/

Come and support Nine Lives through Romeo the Cat's website. This effort will pull together funds from across the country - and even the globe - and ALL the November monies will come to us. 

Spread the word!

Fraidy Cat Friday party photos...

Donors keep doors open at Redwood City cat shelter

By Shaun Bishop
Daily News Staff Writer
Posted: 10/31/2009 12:26:49 AM PDT
Updated: 10/31/2009 12:26:49 AM PDT

A struggling cat shelter in Redwood City got another life and will remain open at least six more months after receiving a flood of donations since September, its founder said Friday.

"I've been actually amazed at the response," said veterinarian Monica Thompson.

Faced with having to close or downsize just a couple months ago, the 5-year-old Nine Lives Foundation shelter has pulled in thousands of dollars since Thompson sent 1,500 letters to past donors, clinic customers and adoptive families asking for help.

Thompson realized that the cost of running the shelter — which rescues and finds homes for cats that would otherwise be euthanized at other shelters — had become too much for her to support with money from her separate low-cost veterinary clinic. Declining donations in the recession compounded the problem.

But Thompson's direct appeal to supporters and a Daily News article about the shelter's troubles drew enough donations for the shelter to continue providing a haven for almost 200 cats.

"I think the article reached people that had never heard of us," Thompson said. "We got letters from people all over the Bay Area. I got flowers from somebody I didn't know. It was great."

While the exact figures are still being tallied, Thompson said the shelter has received more than $20,000 in individual donations since September. More significantly, revenue from monthly pledges has gone up from about $1,600 per month to around $6,000, which helps cover the shelter's operating costs, she said.

She also organized a "Coins for Cats" fundraiser during this month in which kids designed their own containers to collect donations for the shelter. Thompson held a fundraising party at the shelter Friday night to collect the coin containers and to celebrate the generosity of the donors.

With the influx of cash, Thompson said the shelter should remain solvent for at least another six months. Thompson said the shelter — a warehouse on a frontage road along Highway 101 — currently costs about $30,000 per month to operate, including salaries for four full-time staff members, $5,000 monthly rent, and $1,000 monthly for utilities, food and kitty litter.

In September, the shelter temporarily stopped rescuing cats in an effort to shrink the population in case it was forced to close, but has since resumed taking in new "death row kitties" from other shelters.

"We are still reaching out to shelters and doing our best to help the most desperate cats," Thompson said, "but we're still trying to work on the population that we have."

She's trying to cut costs by using fewer paid workers and relying more on donations of food and kitty litter. She says she hopes the generosity of her supporters will continue.

"We still need monthly donations, we still need volunteers," she said. "We still need all the same things."

For information, call 650-368-1365 or visit www.ninelivesfoundation.org.

http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_13684256?nclick_check=1

Dear Friends...

Can you spare 3 minutes to help needy cats & kittens? I promise this will be easy & quick...

There is a website run by a woman (and her cats!) which raises money for animal organizations by holding Twitter ‘paw’-parties and other online events to raise awareness & encourage donations.

Each month only one animal organization is chosen to be the recipient of all donations through the web site. Most of them earn about $1,000 dollars!

I am campaigning to get Nine Lives Foundation to be the one recipient for the month of November. This is vital because the recession has led to a big decrease in donations and Nine Lives is in danger of having to scale back or close their doors. This fundraising effort is urgently needed, and YOUR one-time vote could make difference.

So I am asking you to take those 3 minutes of your time after you read this email and nominate for Nine Lives. You can cast one vote per each email address that you have.

Here’s what you need to do... go to this page:
http://www.romeothecat.com/contact/

You’ll see a form with 4 empty spaces to be filled.

1) Your Name
2) Your Email Address
3) Your web site -this is not required and you can leave it blank

4) Your message:
This is the place to type that you are nominating the Nine Lives Foundation (www.NineLivesFoundation.org) to be the donation recipient for November. If you want to say more about Nine Lives or anything else to support the nomination, please do! Any personal experiences would help. But you can keep it short and simple if you like. Just make sure to say the rescue name and web address!

After that, press submit, and if you have any other email addresses that you use, then please reload the page after your first vote has been processed and fill it out again.

And if you can encourage other cat-loving friends and family to vote, we would appreciate it!
~ THANK YOU FOR SUPPORTING NINE LIVES & THE NEEDY CATS & KITTENS IN OUR COMMUNITY! ~

If you want to read more about this animal fundraising web site, you can check out a news story here:
"Animal friends have 'pawpawties' for charity"
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jz_7RzZvPT8Mx-bGS72xyMjuaP0AD9B1OO382

And you can learn more about Nine Lives at their website.

Veruca - A success story

Dear Nine Lives Staff & Volunteers,

We adopted Veruca (now Juno) a few weeks ago and we feel exceptionally
lucky to have her as part of our family.

She is a joy, snuggling and playing with equal abandon. Our dog is in love with her too! They are constant companions... playing like fools, eating, and sleeping together.
Thank you so much for helping us find her, and for providing such excellent care. We have special thanks for the foster family who sheltered her while she was still nursing kittens, as well.

Sincerely,
The Avis-Reece family

Nine Lives article in the Mercury News.

http://www.mercurynews.com/twitter/ci_13321682?source=email

Redwood City cat shelter may be forced to close
By Shaun Bishop
Daily News Staff Writer
Posted: 09/11/2009 10:50:14 PM PDT

On a recent summer day, Monica Thompson walked up to a nondescript warehouse in Redwood City and pushed past the screen door into a large room filled with nearly 200 cats.

Some were sleeping in cages, others crawling around a large enclosure with climbing posts toward the back of the building. Dozens were roaming freely around the room, rubbing against the legs of visitors. One was sprawled out on an overhead beam, napping.

"Every cat in here," the veterinarian says as she looks around, "was supposed to be killed."

Instead, Thompson takes them and finds them new adoptive owners through the Nine Lives Foundation, which she founded in 2004. Thompson calls them "death row kitties" — cats that were scheduled to be euthanized at other shelters because of behavior problems or health issues.

Sometime this fall, though, all those cats in the foundation's shelter may need to find another place to go.

With donations to the foundation dropping during the recession, Thompson says she can no longer afford the shelter's $40,000-per-month cost, 80 percent of which comes out of her own pockets.

She also runs a veterinary practice offering low-cost care for cats in a separate Redwood City building, and gives about $20,000 per month from her practice to the shelter. But she says that's not enough and the shelter may have to close or downsize significantly.

"There's only so much I can do by myself," she said.

For now, the shelter has stopped taking new "death row" cats as it tries to find homes for all the current residents in case it has to shut down.

Determined to save as many cats as she could, Thompson, 43, founded the foundation five years ago and moved into the warehouse on a frontage road along Highway 101. She says shelters all over Northern California now regularly e-mail or call her with offers to take cats.

She acknowledges shelters have to euthanize some cats because the cats are gravely injured or because the shelter runs out of space. But she believes shelters too often put down cats that have adoption potential.

"It's not (the shelter's) fault, but I still think there's so much that could be done that isn't," she said.

The accountants say she's crazy trying to run a low-cost veterinary clinic and an expensive rescue shelter at the same time. "I was an economics major and I know better," she said, "but somebody has to do this."

Besides the "death row" cats, Thompson has been giving her clinic patients another chance at life.

A couple months ago, a woman brought in a black cat that had been struck near a freeway onramp in Tracy. The cat's front left leg was crushed and her abdomenal cavity had been split open.

Thompson took the cat, waived the $100 surrender fee, then sewed up her stomach and amputated the leg for free.

"Cats with these kinds of injuries don't make it past the shelter," Thompson said as the recovering cat pawed at her. "And you can see she definitely wants to live."

The cat was adopted and named "Mimsy" by its new owners, who posted a grateful message on the Nine Lives Foundation's blog.

"Mimsy is becoming more playful and curious, too, and likes to be up on her hind legs to scratch her tower or swat at the Cat Dancer," the family wrote.

Rescue groups like Thompson's aren't a panacea for the thousands of unwanted cats that come into Bay Area shelters.

The Peninsula Humane Society is required to take all of the 10,000 dogs and cats per year that come through its door, said vice president Scott Delucchi. The humane society treats many of the cats but also has to euthanize some.

The organization put down 196 "treatable" cats last year, meaning "they had some issue that, given endless resources, they could possibly be treated and then placed into a home," Delucchi said. Another 1,265 "untreatable" cats, those that were simply suffering, were also euthanized.

"The ones we can't treat are often the real difficult cases that would be hard for any rescue groups to take on as well," Delucchi said.

Thompson says she has until the end of October to make a decision on the shelter's future. She's planning to run a "Coins for Cats" fundraising drive encouraging donors to collect coins through the end of the month.

She has also sent letters to donors and adoptive families asking for $20 per month to keep the foundation going.

"If they can just help us with $20 a month, that makes a huge difference," she said.

For more information or to donate, visit www.ninelivesfoundation.org.

E-mail Shaun Bishop at sbishop@dailynewsgroup.com.