Ep 677: The Environment Makes the Cat: The SAFE Framework for Community Cat Adoption, with Jodi Belongié, RVT, Co-founder of Chico Cat Café, Founder & Executive Director of The CATS Foundation

"The environment we build around a cat shapes her outcome more than any single intervention we can ever make."

his episode is sponsored-in-part by Maddie's Fund, OcuTrap, and The Community Cat Clinic.

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 Stacey 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.

Press Play Now For:

• 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.