On a long shot, one community rallied to help save hundreds of homeless cats.

Nominate an empowered woman in your life and Tory Burch may donate $5,000 to the nonprofit of her choice.

    
Explore

On a long shot, one community rallied to help save hundreds of homeless cats.

True

Any warm-blooded animal lover knows the importance of spaying and neutering cats — what you may not know is how intensive the logistics are of pulling it off.

In 2016, Ruff Start Rescue in Princeton, Minnesota, a nonprofit that works to help homeless animals find fosters or forever homes, decided to expand their program, which they describe as one of the most important that they run.

This particular initiative is a crucial one for Ruff Start because it prevents even more stray kittens from being born, thereby preventing the homeless cat community from growing even larger.

All images courtesy of Ruff Start Rescue, used with permission.

That's why they decided to seek extra funding to help expand it — and they had their work cut out for them.

Jenna Trisko, the program's development director, had been reaching out to people in her network for new ways to find funds when she came across something different: the State Farm Neighborhood Assist grant.

Unlike Jenna's other grant proposals, the Neighborhood Assist program didn't require an in-person meeting or the approval of a board. State Farm would narrow down the applications to the top 200, then applications would be put to a vote and the decision based on whose community presented the strongest showing.

They kept their fingers crossed, hoping to get the extra funding needed cover the surgeries, which can be expensive.

The existing fundraising they had could only cover a fraction of the surgeries they wanted to provide in order to help keep the homeless cat population under control and healthy.

Jenna had no idea whether Ruff Start would be a strong contender, but she decided to give it a shot, for the love of kitten-kind.

"It was very unlike me to do that," Jenna laughs.

A few months later, she received a notification. Ruff Start was a top contender for a $25,000 grant.

The Neighborhood Assist program that had seemed like a long shot was now within reach. Given the green light by the State Farm team, all that stood between Ruff Start and a $25,000 check was one round of community voting.

It was time to get the Ruff Start community involved.

Ruff Start doesn't have a shelter because all of its animals are placed in foster homes, so the community is tight-knit and full of individuals willing to provide temporarily love to adoptable kitties until they can find permanent homes for them.

This style of animal welfare brings foster families together more closely than at a typical shelter.

"I’ve been with the organization for four years, and many of the people I’ve never met," Jenna says. "But they feel like family. It’s just amazing."

That family came in especially handy when it was time to vote for Ruff Start in the Neighborhood Assist program. They were able to rally the community to participate in the voting every day for three long weeks.

Plus, since no one else in Minnesota was nominated, all of the animal welfare supporters in the state could easily support their cause.

"We reached out to our other partners and got the word out that we needed people voting every day."

This continued for three excruciatingly tense weeks.

"It was the biggest nail-biter ever," Jenna laughs.

Finally, the winners were announced — and Jenna's proposal for Ruff Start was among them.

"I think I cried for two days!" she says.

In all, the Neighborhood Assist program helped Ruff Start spay and neuter over 500 cats.

The program was so popular that Ruff Start spent the entire grant in just five months, less than a third of the time they originally anticipated.

Ruff Start recently received a second grant, which is being used to build a facility to house cats before and after their spay/neuter surgery.

They're now working on building a facility where cats can be temporarily housed post-surgery — a project for which their community helped win another Neighborhood Assist grant.

Volunteers at Ruff Start are also focused on teaching the public things like how to read "cat body language."

Those volunteers design learning materials about animals and their care — such as how to understand their body language, what to feed them, or what do if you find an injured or stray animal — and then, they take them to schools, youth groups, YMCAs, and more.

By extending their mission beyond foster and adoption, Ruff Start can spread knowledge that helps improve the lives of animals that aren't necessarily part of their direct community.

In the end, Neighborhood Assist gave Ruff Start more than just a grant, it gave them a bonding experience.

"It's so touching to see a community come together for an initiative," Jenna says. "I've been writing grants for 11 years. I have never had an opportunity to be part of something like that."

The effort that Ruff Start and the animal welfare community put into winning the grant proved that regular people have the power to do what might, at first, feel impossible.

If you want to find out more about Neighborhood Assist, and how it's helping improve communities across the country, check out the program here.

Tory Burch

Tory Burch Empowered Women

popular

This woman found out shelters in LA don't accept women with teen boys. So she made sure hers did.

True

Judy Vaughan has spent most of her life helping other women, first as the director of House of Ruth, a safe haven for homeless families in East Los Angeles, and later as the Project Coordinator for Women for Guatemala, a solidarity organization committed to raising awareness about human rights abuses.

But in 1996, she decided to take things a step further. A house became available in the mid-Wilshire area of Los Angeles and she was offered the opportunity to use it to help other women and children. So, in partnership with a group of 13 people who she knew from her years of activism, she decided to make it a transitional residence program for homeless women and their children. They called the program Alexandria House.

"I had learned from House of Ruth that families who are homeless are often isolated from the surrounding community," Judy says. "So we decided that as part of our mission, we would also be a neighborhood center and offer a number of resources and programs, including an after-school program and ESL classes."

She also decided that, unlike many other shelters in Los Angeles, she would accept mothers with their teenage boys.

"There are very few in Los Angeles [that do] due to what are considered liability issues," Judy explains. "Given the fact that there are (conservatively) 56,000 homeless people and only about 11,000 shelter beds on any one night, agencies can be selective on who they take."

Their Board of Directors had already determined that they should take families that would have difficulties finding a place. Some of these challenges include families with more than two children, immigrant families without legal documents, moms who are pregnant with other small children, families with a member who has a disability [and] families with service dogs.

"Being separated from your son or sons, especially in the early teen years, just adds to the stress that moms who are unhoused are already experiencing," Judy says.

"We were determined to offer women with teenage boys another choice."

Courtesy of Judy Vaughan

Alexandria House also doesn't kick boys out when they turn 18. For example, Judy says they currently have a mom with two daughters (21 and 2) and a son who just turned 18. The family had struggled to find a shelter that would take them all together, and once they found Alexandria House, they worried the boy would be kicked out on his 18th birthday. But, says Judy, "we were not going to ask him to leave because of his age."

Homelessness is a big issue in Los Angeles. "[It] is considered the homeless capital of the United States," Judy says. "The numbers have not changed significantly since 1984 when I was working at the House of Ruth." The COVID-19 pandemic has only compounded the problem. According to Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), over 66,000 people in the greater Los Angeles area were experiencing homelessness in 2020, representing a rise of 12.7% compared with the year before.

Each woman who comes to Alexandria House has her own unique story, but some common reasons for ending up homeless include fleeing from a domestic violence or human trafficking situation, aging out of foster care and having no place to go, being priced out of an apartment, losing a job, or experiencing a family emergency with no 'cushion' to pay the rent.

"Homelessness is not a definition; it is a situation that a person finds themselves in, and in fact, it can happen to almost anyone. There are many practices and policies that make it almost impossible to break out of poverty and move out of homelessness."

And that's why Alexandria House exists: to help them move out of it. How long that takes depends on the woman, but according to Judy, families stay an average of 10 months. During that time, the women meet with support staff to identify needs and goals and put a plan of action in place.

A number of services are provided, including free childcare, programs and mentoring for school-age children, free mental health counseling, financial literacy classes and a savings program. They have also started Step Up Sisterhood LA, an entrepreneurial program to support women's dreams of starting their own businesses. "We serve as a support system for as long as a family would like," Judy says, even after they have moved on.

And so far, the program is a resounding success.

92 percent of the 200 families who stayed at Alexandria House have found financial stability and permanent housing — not becoming homeless again.

Since founding Alexandria House 25 years ago, Judy has never lost sight of her mission to join with others and create a vision of a more just society and community. That is why she is one of Tory Burch's Empowered Women this year — and the donation she receives as a nominee will go to Alexandria House and will help grow the new Start-up Sisterhood LA program.

"Alexandria House is such an important part of my life," says Judy. "It has been amazing to watch the children grow up and the moms recreate their lives for themselves and for their families. I have witnessed resiliency, courage, and heroic acts of generosity."

From Your Site Articles

We asked three people about how vaccines have impacted their lives. Here’s what they said.

Images courtesy of John Scully, Walden University, Ingrid Scully

True

Since March of 2020, over 29 million Americans have been diagnosed with COVID-19, according to the CDC. Over 540,000 have died in the United States as this unprecedented pandemic has swept the globe. And yet, by the end of 2020, it looked like science was winning: vaccines had been developed.

In celebration of the power of science we spoke to three people: an individual, a medical provider, and a vaccine scientist about how vaccines have impacted them throughout their lives. Here are their answers:

John Scully, 79, resident of Florida

Photo courtesy of John Scully

When John Scully was born, America was in the midst of an epidemic: tens of thousands of children in the United States were falling ill with paralytic poliomyelitis — otherwise known as polio, a disease that attacks the central nervous system and often leaves its victims partially or fully paralyzed.

"As kids, we were all afraid of getting polio," he says, "because if you got polio, you could end up in the dreaded iron lung and we were all terrified of those." Iron lungs were respirators that enclosed most of a person's body; people with severe cases often would end up in these respirators as they fought for their lives.

John remembers going to see matinee showings of cowboy movies on Saturdays and, before the movie, shorts would run. "Usually they showed the news," he says, "but I just remember seeing this one clip warning us about polio and it just showed all these kids in iron lungs." If kids survived the iron lung, they'd often come back to school on crutches, in leg braces, or in wheelchairs.

"We all tried to be really careful in the summer — or, as we called it back then, 'polio season,''" John says. This was because every year around Memorial Day, major outbreaks would begin to emerge and they'd spike sometime around August. People weren't really sure how the disease spread at the time, but many believed it traveled through the water. There was no cure — and every child was susceptible to getting sick with it.

"We couldn't swim in hot weather," he remembers, "and the municipal outdoor pool would close down in August."

Then, in 1954 clinical trials began for Dr. Jonas Salk's vaccine against polio and within a year, his vaccine was announced safe. "I got that vaccine at school," John says. Within two years, U.S. polio cases had dropped 85-95 percent — even before a second vaccine was developed by Dr. Albert Sabin in the 1960s. "I remember how much better things got after the vaccines came out. They changed everything," John says.

Keep Reading Show less

science