Jodi Belongié has spent more than 25 years in animal welfare and shelter medicine, driven by a question that traces back to age 14, when she talked her way into fostering an abandoned pregnant cat with no rescue to call. That instinct, that the systems cats need don’t have to already exist, you can build them, led her to co-found the Chico Cat Café in 2021, which became the proving ground for what she calls the SAFE framework: an original behavioral welfare model, developed through the UC Davis Koret Shelter Medicine Program, that reframes adoption assessment around a single question — not “is this cat adoptable?” but “is this environment giving her a fair chance to show us who she is?”

Jodi and Stacy dig into what that looked like in practice: the café’s deliberately home-like design, hard caps on capacity (never more than 12–14 cats, nine visitors an hour), and a rescue-based intake process built to get cats settled before they ever meet an adopter. The conversation widens into Jodi’s vision for community cat management’s next chapter — small, replicable hubs that go beyond adoption into trap depots, spay/neuter access, and food pantries, especially in the rural and under-resourced areas philanthropy tends to overlook. That’s the mission behind The CATS Foundation, launching spring 2027.

• The origin story behind Jodi’s decades in animal welfare — and why she says “the credential has always been secondary to the question”
• What the SAFE framework is and how it reframes adoption assessment around environment instead of the cat
• Inside the design choices behind Chico Cat Café’s home-like, non-industrial space
• The capacity-for-care numbers Jodi holds firm on, and why more cats than people is intentional
• How SAFE’s underlying philosophy already shows up in the work of colony managers, TNR practitioners, and foster coordinators
• Jodi’s vision for a “2.0” model of small, replicable community cat hubs — and why she believes it should start small
• The mission behind The CATS Foundation and its spring 2027 launch

Resources & Links

• Jodi’s Substack, The Outpost Observer: https://pawsitiveparadigm.substack.com/
• Jodi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jodibelongiervt/

Editor’s note: Since this conversation was recorded, Jodi has closed Chico Cat Café, paused The CATS Foundation, and consolidated her cats-centric consulting and publishing work under Nine Lives Strategies.