Animal Welfare Professionals

Hello,

       My name is Rafa Garcia and I am the Community cat coordinator at the Humane Society of Yuma, we are a non-profit shelter based in Yuma, Az. We are the only shelter within a 200-mile radius. With that being said we rely heavily on our community for our TNR program to thrive and I am very lucky to have such a passionate community when it comes to the community cats. However not everyone in the community shares the same passion, and our biggest challenge is and I feel like will always be is changing the community's perspective towards the community cat and how effective the TNR program can really be. 

      As of last year, I have started partnering with our local county library branch and hosting quarterly community cats town halls. This has been a great way to have the interaction with the community while spreading the education about the TNR program and also have the community be heard. As a non-profit shelter I am the only one that manages the TNR program and anything to do with community cats, and as mention above I heavily rely on the community. One of the biggest tasks the community does for us is trap, transport, and releases the cats. Even when we have big surgery days for TNR we have multiple people schedule to trap upwards of 50 cats on said day. Something we are starting is to track where we in took the most neonates from last kitten season and try to micro target the location by TNR and educating the area. When it comes to collecting data we use www.Catstats.org for the colonies, it is great tool to keep track of who is caring for said colony and also a general number of cats in said area. As we are a shelter as well we also use ShelterLuv which provides me with great amount of data to see where we are intaking cats from. I will attach some of the educational flyers we had out and the instructions we have for people to register their colonies. Also the presentation I use when doing an education meeting that touches a little bit of everything about the TNR program/ community cats. The link attached is also a simple website to use to create heat maps very straight forward-

https://lookerstudio.google.com