My name is Andre!

All animals are spayed and have age appropriate vacations

We're not a shelter. There's no building, no paid staff, no posted hours. What we are is a group of people - some who've been doing animal rescue for decades, some who joined us this year fresh out of college - who spend their evenings trapping cats in vineyards and their lunch breaks bottle-feeding kittens at their desks.

We all have day jobs. Nobody at NCPC gets paid to do this. We're running TNR before our shifts start, fostering after they end, and doing adoption events on weekends we could be spending some other way. A lot of us just bring the kittens to work - a two-week-old bottle baby can't be left home alone for eight hours, so it comes along, tucked in a crate under the desk.

We're a mix of old hands and new energy. Some of our volunteers have been trapping, fostering, and running colonies since before NCPC existed - they've seen it all and taught the rest of us most of what we know. This year we've also had a wave of younger volunteers join, and honestly, the group is better for it. Decades of experience paired with people willing to learn something new and show up with fresh energy - that combination is a big part of why we get as much done as we do.

Every foster lives in a real home. Kittens and cats go straight into a volunteer's house - the couch, the bathroom, sometimes a kid's bedroom - so they get real socialization and a real routine before we ever ask someone to adopt them.

We go where the need is worst, not just where it's easy. Most of our work is local: vineyard colonies, strays off the street, helping neighbors fix their own pets when they can't afford to. But we also drive up into the Central Valley and down into Southern California to pull cats out of shelters so overwhelmed that euthanasia isn't a risk, it's a certainty.

We're taking in more animals whose people are gone. We're seeing a real uptick in older cats coming to us because their owner died and left no plan for who'd care for them. These are cats who spent years being someone's whole world, and now have nowhere to go. Senior cats are a harder sell than kittens, but we make room for them anyway.

We keep teaching ourselves whatever saves money and saves lives. A lot of our volunteers are well-educated, curious people, and it shows - we're constantly picking up skills that used to mean an expensive trip to the vet. Last year our treasurer learned to run FIV/FeLV tests herself, so we can test cats in-house instead of paying outside lab fees every time. This year the group is learning to tube-feed neonatal kittens, the ones too small and weak to nurse - a skill that can be the difference between a kitten making it through its first week or not.

Every dollar goes to the cats. There's no overhead, no payroll to fund. When you give to NCPC, you're paying for a surgery, a vet visit, a bag of kitten formula - not an office or a salary.

None of this is glamorous. It's a lot of tired volunteers with day jobs, doing hard, unpaid work because they can't stand the alternative. That's the whole organization - and it's why we punch well above our size.