Best Cat, the cat store at 3455 Fairview St., says it finds homes for about 200 cats a year, and last year it started turning cats in need away. Now it says it has reached the first goal of a fundraiser to set up a non-profit and start building custom cat rooms in what it calls its newly renovated adoption centre.

That first target was $4,500, enough, the store says, to build its first cat room and register the non-profit as it gets ready to apply for charity status. "We absolutely blew past our first target of $4,500," the owners said in a video recorded less than 24 hours after the campaign began, by which point it had passed $6,400. They then set a next target of $9,000 and said they were almost there. The campaign page has since shown more than $11,000 from 88 donations, past halfway to the $20,000 stretch goal.

Best Cat's fundraising targets and total raised
  • First target$4,500
  • Next target$9,000
  • Raised so far$11,141
  • Stretch goal$20,000

The shop already doubles as a rescue hub. The owners say more than 1,000 cats have found homes through it since it opened in 2022, and that the business pays over $30,000 a year in rent, taxes and utilities just for the space where rescue cats are fostered. When they began turning cats away last year, they took over the unit next door, doubled their rescue space and added a quarantine room for new, pregnant and recovering cats.

This summer someone broke into the rescue shed behind the store and took the metal cages that held its overflow cats. The owners say they are replacing them with custom cat rooms rather than more cages.

Meagan Daigle, who runs the store with Kyle Daigle, puts more than 40 hours a week into rescue work on top of that job, according to the fundraiser: vet runs, organizing foster homes and what it calls "the calls nobody else takes." The non-profit is meant to let her do rescue full time, and to add capacity for other rescue groups rather than become one more rescue.

Reaching the stretch goal would pay for custom cat rooms that visitors can step inside to spend time with foster cats, an emergency fund for medical cases a partner rescue can't cover on its own, and registering the non-profit, with a charity application to follow.

The campaign, organized by Kyle Daigle, runs on GoFundMe as "We can't save all the cats... yet: Burlington's cat hub." Best Cat says donors who give more than $100 will have their names on a laser-cut oak founding donor plaque.