A beautiful day in the neighborhood
On any given morning on the West Side of Chicago, you might smell the coffee brewing and see folks scrambling to start their days. “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood,” Mr. Rogers might add. If you listen closely enough, you can hear a Tupperware container cracking open and the soft greetings of Mr. Jackson and Mr. Smith — two retired men, meeting like clockwork in the alley to share coffee and feed the cats who call it their outdoor home.
Too often, the story goes that we have to persuade our neighbors to tolerate the community cats. Whether it’s offering humane deterrents to keep cats off private property or becoming the personal PR team for the cats’ rodent control skills, there’s an assumption that community cats are a nuisance.
But Chicagoans? They’re not buying that narrative. Not even close. In fact, many are reaching out to Cats in Action to keep the cats in their communities — they’re looking for ways to help.
Founded in 2020 by powerhouse duo Liz Houtz and Erica Roewade, Cats in Action started as a grassroots guide to help folks learn the ropes of trap-neuter-vaccinate-return (TNVR). The early days of Cats in Action focused on education through workshops about how most cats outdoors belong to a local colony and may not make good candidates for adoption due to their lack of human socialization. They also offered trap lending and education around the need for TNVR to help control the community cat population and keep new kittens from being born.
Cats in Action is now a full-blown nonprofit — working to support and create community cat programs across the city. They provide cat traps and work with local veterinarians to get cats spayed or neutered and vaccinated, often at a low or no cost to the caregiver. Then, Cats in Action releases these cats back into the neighborhood where they were trapped, occasionally capturing a video so the caregiver knows who’s back in their outdoor home. As Cats in Action told us, the people of Chicago see their cats as neighbors — and no one wants to see them producing unnecessary litters or needlessly entering animal shelters.
Of course, earning trust doesn’t happen overnight. Take Mr. Jackson, for example, who was not so sure about the Cats in Action team when he first saw them. Liz remembers it like this: “This man yells out of the second story of the building, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ So, I'm trying to explain TNVR by shouting across the alley. I was able to say, ‘Don’t worry, I'm bringing all these cats back!’” Mr. Jackson’s hesitation is completely understandable. He takes great pride in being able to care for these furry neighbors, and the thought of someone taking them away is devastating.
Erica adds, “We are trying to break that stereotype of the ‘rescue warriors’ that pull up, jump out of their car, and grab some cat off somebody's private property.” “Rescue warriors” is Erica’s way of referring to well-meaning folks who go to neighborhoods where they don’t live and remove the cats who live outdoors because of their assumptions about the caregivers and the quality of life they provide for the cats.
That’s not the Cats in Action way. Liz and Erica have been doing this work for over a decade, and they’ve built a strategy that’s just as much about people as it is about cats.
Erica says, “It's all about [relating to] people. We started going through all the different scenarios regarding pushback that we get from the community, law enforcement, municipal [shelters], neighbors, and the community caretakers themselves. How do we behave verbally, semantically, and physically?” They began to create a resource with Cats in Action. Erica knows that people want to be heard. So, take that time. Take a deep breath, and understand that when you get there, you're going to give this person 10 or 15 minutes — like Liz did with Mr. Jackson. Sometimes all that’s needed is a little reassurance that we love the cats just as much as they do.
Cats in Action is in it for the long haul. They’re building something sustainable — something rooted in trust. “We've had folks turn from initial skeptics to volunteers,” Liz says. And through the power of a simple conversation, Liz discovered that Mr. Smith was a retired police officer. “He told me exactly what was going on in the neighborhood and kept his eye out for me. When people start to trust you, they'll help you.”
“It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor. Won’t you be mine?” You can almost hear Mr. Rogers humming along, can’t you?
Because what Liz and Erica are fighting for is dignity and respect. For cats who matter just as much as any other cat. For the people who care for them. For the communities that rally around them.
With neighbors like these, the question isn’t why community cats belong — it’s how we build more neighborhoods like this.
And with TNVR programs like Cats in Action leading the charge, we’re not simply protecting cats — we’re changing the game for shelters, reducing shelter admissions, and moving one step closer to no-kill nationwide. Now that’s a neighborhood worth showing up for.
-Julie
