About CCT

Community Cats Toronto is a 100% volunteer-run registered Canadian charity that is entirely supported by donations from people like you, who love cats and want to make a difference in the lives of unowned cats.

Community Cats Toronto is not a cat rescue. We were formed out of a need to provide Trap - Neuter - Return (TNR) education in Toronto and humane colony management skills when the Toronto Feral Cat Coalition formed in 2010 and have trained more than 4,500 people in Toronto and beyond to date. Our course is based on content created by Neighborhood Cats in New York City and adapted to the coordinated TNR program in Toronto.

Our mission to is provide low-cost, accessible education on helping community cats, meaning lost, abandoned, unowned, and feral cats through TNR. For the first decade we operated, we held once monthly courses moving around Toronto and the GTA, often out of Toronto Public Library locations. We offered hands-on learning about trapping and TNR. In 2020, we started offering our course live online and in 2022, we moved to an on-demand format to help make it easier for anyone to get their certificate. With the costs savings from no longer needing to rent a space, we reduced our course fee to $10 from $20 with the same intention of removing barriers for anyone wanting to learn.

Our TNR course and registering your colony in CatStats is the prerequisite to accessing the free TNR clinics and services that are apart of the TNR program in Toronto. It also qualifies certificate holders for free food donations (based on availability), a trap bank, and use of the Recovery Centre.

In 2013, we helped to open the Toronto Feral Cat Recovery Centre (RC), a unique facility that allowed any graduate of our course to use a free, volunteer-run recovery space in the Scarborough area. We were responsible for the financial and lease aspects of the RC until 2022, when Toronto Cat Rescue, whose volunteers had managed the space for many years, took over the lease.

We have a board of five TNR experts who started out as cat lovers and began noticing community cats in their area and looked for resources in Toronto to help them. That led to trapping, colony management, and running TNR projects in their own time or through volunteers with cat rescue groups who do colony management and eventually into teaching the course in-person and online.

In 2016, Urban Cat Relief, a cat rescue that did colony management, TNR, and rescue/adoption from the streets, merged with Toronto Feral Cat Project to form Community Cats Toronto. The rescue side of the mission ceased at this time and we continued as an educational and advocacy charity that is still the only charity on the Toronto Feral Cat Coalition that does not have a mandate beyond facilitating the TNR program.

We collaborate closely with Toronto Street Cats, which is a non-charitable, volunteer-operated organization operating a high volume TNR clinic out of Toronto Humane Society’s veterinary clinic and hosting a workshop where they build low-cost winter cat shelters for TNR’ed cats living in managed colonies.