CatPAWS Receives $2000 Grant for Life Saving Success in National Adoption Challenge

SEAL BEACH, CA, February 2, 2026 —─ Helen Sanders CatPAWS has been awarded a $2,000 grant from Best Friends Animal Society, a leading national animal welfare organization working to save cats and dogs in America’s shelters.

The grant recognizes Helen Sanders CatPAWS’ efforts to increase pet adoptions through successfully completing the Best Friends Bring Love Home Challenge — a nationwide initiative led by Best Friends to help more cats and dogs find homes this December.

The Bring Love Home Challenge ran from December 1-31, 2025. Nearly 300 organizations were selected to participate, with 219 reporting their results, leading to an extraordinary 15,321 pets finding homes in December — including 21 adopted in December from Helen Sanders CatPAWS.

“We spent all of December celebrating the cats who got to be in a home for the holidays thanks to our participation in the Bring Love Home Challenge,” said CatPAWS Director Deborah Felin-Magaldi. “Being awarded this grant from Best Friends means we can keep that incredible momentum going! This challenge, and grant, will have lasting effects for the pets in our care, and for our community.”

Participants in the Bring Love Home Challenge piloted data-backed best practices to make pet adoption and fostering more accessible and welcoming to their community— which included reducing adoption fees, shortening applications, eliminating home checks, offering multilingual adoption and foster support, and more.

“More pets being adopted and fostered means more lives saved. We’re proud to recognize Helen Sanders CatPAWS for their commitment to lifesaving,” said Whitney Bollinger, Director of Strategy & Network Operations, Best Friends Animal Society. “Participating in the Bring Love Home Challenge got cats and dogs out of shelters and into homes in December, and we are excited to see this lifesaving continue with even more pets in Orange County and Long Beach continuing to find the loving homes they deserve!”.

Learn more about Helen Sanders CatPAWS by visiting https://helensanderscatpaws.com and by following on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/HSCatPAWS and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/helensanderscatpaws/. Make a lifesaving impact by adopting (https://helensanderscatpaws.com/adopt/), volunteering or fostering (https://helensanderscatpaws.com/volunteer-foster/).

About Helen Sanders CatPAWS

Founded in 2010 to continue the legacy of Helen Sanders, who practiced and advocated trap-neuter-return (TNR) for feral community cats since the 1990s. CatPAWS rescues at-risk cats from public shelters, finds adoptive homes, provides support to the community with education, low or no-cost spay/neuter clinics, traveling kitten therapy program, and the DIY kitten care project.

About Best Friends Animal Society

Best Friends Animal Society is a leading animal welfare organization dedicated to saving the lives of dogs and cats in America's shelters and making the entire country no-kill. Founded in 1984, Best Friends runs lifesaving facilities and programs nationwide in partnership with more than 5,500 shelters and rescue organizations. From our headquarters in Kanab, Utah, we also operate the nation's largest no-kill animal sanctuary — a destination that brings our mission to life for thousands of visitors each year. We maintain the most comprehensive animal sheltering data in the country and make it accessible to the public — empowering communities with critical insights into the needs of their local shelters and how they can help. We believe every dog and cat deserves a home. And we believe that, by working together, we can Save Them All®.