Just a few years ago, Terri Doumit didn’t know what working with a feral cat would actually be like. But in 2019, she found herself standing in a gas station parking lot in Columbus with two other women, looking out at a sea of unowned cats and thinking, “how do we fix this?”

“Even then, looking at those cats, I didn’t know the gravity of the situation,” Doumit told The Dispatch on Wednesday. “There are cats everywhere. And it can be overwhelming. But we’ve literally taken it one step at a time.”

Ever since that day, Doumit and other volunteers have been working as a grassroots collective to trap, neuter and release cats to fight feline overpopulation and euthanasia in the state. This past week, OCC became an official nonprofit with 501(c)(3) status, and Doumit said that change will help the organization’s mission continue to grow.

“We’re just getting started,” Doumit said.

Operation Colony Cats works by responding to applications for spay and neuter assistance, including helping with trapping feral cat colonies. Once cats have been trapped, Doumit said, their temperament helps to decide what happens next.

Tame cats often go to local humane societies for surgery and medical treatment, while cats that are more feral to Mississippi State University’s Office of Veterinary Medicine for the same. Tame strays are then placed with foster families in OCC’s network and then taken to Sweet Paws Rescue in Massachusetts, while feral cats are often re-released where they were captured – preventing other cats that have not been fixed from setting up shop.

So far, Doumit said, the collective has helped spay or neuter almost 8,000 cats and kittens and made almost 4,000 available for adoption across the U.S. and Canada.

“If we continue this trajectory, and we really get the community to understand what we do, and that we’ll help anybody … and if we can get enough information out there, and we can reduce the suffering in this area through spay and neuter, we should see fewer and fewer unowned cats in the outdoors,” Doumit said.

Kelly Barczykowski started volunteering with OCC in October, after trapping some kittens in her own neighborhood and receiving help from the grassroots group to get them spayed and neutered. Since then, she has become one of the group’s regular fosters, along with volunteering to spearhead applying for nonprofit status.

“There’s no way that we can do all of the good that we want to do with the limited amount of funds that we have, and we wanted to help out Columbus as much as possible, and the surrounding areas,” Barczykowski said. “And the only way to do that was to get out of our comfort zone and to jump into the deep end and just go for it.”

With its new status, Barczykowski said, OCC has become eligible to apply for grant funding – both for spaying and neutering grants and foster animal grants – when it previously ran solely based on donations. Barczykowski also said the new status has made any donations to OCC after June 2 tax-deductible.

Doumit said the nonprofit’s new status will help open doors on the spaying and neutering front, as the group is currently limited to taking cats to be spayed and neutered a few days a week.

“It’s expensive to do all of this work to these kitties,” Doumit said.

Doumit also hopes to further education around the importance of spaying and neutering, as she said the one-day surgery helps to set cats up for a fuller life through disease prevention, changing unwanted behaviors and overpopulation prevention.

“We want to help anybody that’s wanting to make a change, who’s wanting to make a difference,” Doumit said. “And we just want to make a healthier community for the cats. And we want to make them a welcome part of our community versus a dreaded part of our community.”

Besides access to more funding, both Doumit and Barczykowski said they hope working officially as a nonprofit will draw more volunteers to OCC, as they always need help with trapping animals, driving them to clinics and other parts of their mission.

For more information on Operation Colony Cats, visit operationcolonycats.org/.