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Let's cool down the Cat House cats!
0% complete
£625 raised of £7K
60 donations
Hi, I am Sarah and I run The Cat House - a cat lounge with cafe and cat-themed arts centre, gift shop and gallery, in Norwich. We are a very community minded enterprise for everyone and anyone who loves cats, to visit and to get involved in.
We offer a calming, peaceful experience, unique, safe and inspiring, but it was way too hot this summer, so we feel we need to install air-con in our venue asap to prepare for future heatwaves. This will benefit not just our visitors and staff, but our cats too. So please read on to find out how you can help!
Our mission is simple: to connect people & cats!
- We host 20 permanent resident cats, mostly rescues, here at our Norwich venue, whilst supporting local cats that need new homes by featuring them on our social media. We have helped nearly 150 cats to find new forever homes in the past 3 years, enabling owners to choose the most suitable new home for their cat/s and being able to stay in touch with them if they wish. It also means these cats haven't needed to go to rescue centres and sit in cages for who knows how long, which is depressing for them, anti-social and does not create the best conditions to thrive.
- We support local artists and creatives to promote and sell their cat-themed artwork and creations in our gift shop & gallery.
- We employ local artists, tutors & hosts to run cat-themed workshops and events in our venue which are enjoyed by people all year round, providing opportunities to learn new skills and meet new people, all in amongst our cats.
- We take on up to 7 work experience students from Easton College animal care courses in blocks of 6 months or a year, as well as having up to 25 regular volunteers a week, all of them gaining skills, experience, building confidence and socialising, as well as gaining cat comfort time and building close relationships with our 20 permanent resident cats.
- We offer lower cost visits to care homes, to enable them to bring residents for some cat comfort time, which triggers memories and much sharing of stories of cats they have loved.
- We offer quiet hour and SEND sessions so that all visitors can choose to visit during the sessions that suit them best.
All this and more we offer from our wonderful library-like venue. But it gets hot in the summertime, and it was particularly unbearable over the recent heatwave in summer 2026.
SWEATY AND DANGEROUS
Our staff, our volunteers and our work experience students all carried on regardless, like the heroes they are, whilst the cats flopped and laid about on the coldest patch of floor they could find.
Our visitors still came, mostly, but it was not pleasant in the heat. It was uncomfortable. And sweaty. And there are only so many iced coffees you can drink. Besides, our ice cubes were melting in the ice making machine.
Not only this, but we mustn't forget that cats can't sweat except through certain hairless parts of their bodies, and are covered in hot thick fur (unless they are hairless) and so it is doubly, even triply (is that a word?!) dangerous for them to be in oven-like temperatures for long periods of time, and it is vital they cool down, drink huge amounts of fluids and remain calm.
And yes, we took drastic measures to help cool them down; from making them meaty ice lollies to lick, to providing cooling gel mats, to gently spritzing the air with cold water mist, to offering paddling pools, putting ice cubes in their drinking water, making them tunafish cold soups, blasting the room with fans, shaving their undersides and more, plus they had access to our large catio for fresh air. But there was none, it was hot, humid and relentless. And none of these things we did had much benefit for long.
So, in response to many many enquiries as to whether we had air-con, and in response to many of you saying you would gladly donate towards a GoFundMe campaign to raise funds for having air conditioning fitted ready for the predicted heat of future summers to come, here we are, doing just that. For our cats. For our visitors. And for our sweaty, hard working staff and volunteers.
OUR GOAL
So, we are asking for your help. We recently gained a great quote of £6,000 for the main air-con unit from the lovely Olly at Frostbite Services in Norwich (highly recommended to us by a visitor), plus we will need another £1000 for two indidivual mobile units for the cat room and staff areas. So we are aiming to raise £7,000 in total, which we feel is achievable.
EVERY £1 COUNTS!
We have nearly 25,000 social media followers, so even if only 5% of these put in just £5 each we will have reached our target! Plus on top of these figures we have all our supporters who aren't on social media.
So every £1 truly does help and is appreciated from the bottom of our, and our cats', hearts.
We have researched and found by going along this route, a GoFundMe campaign rather than a Crowdfunding campaign, that 100% of your donations will go towards our goal (after a small platform fee gets deducted) rather than be subject to any governmental tax, which is all good!
FUTURE PLANS
If we manage to surpass this total and raise further funds we plan to put it towards our goal of converting our loo into a fully functional disability friendly loo, which is estimated at around £12,000 - £15,000. This is out of our reach currently, but is something we so dearly would love to do, as we have so many wheelchair users visit us every day and we would be so happy to have full facilities to cover every person's possible need.
OUR SOCIAL MEDIA
For further info about us and our cats please visit: www.cathousenorwich.org
You can also access our booking system from our website which has full info about all our workshops and events or visit via:
Our social media also has info about workshops and events as well as fun daily photos of our cats, posts about local cats needing rehoming and various cat themed news stories that we feel are worth highlighting:
Instagram: @cathousenorwich