Your Friends and Neighbors

{ YOUR FRIENDS & NEIGHBORS } Catsbury Park Lands on Its Feet

The pandemic forced D. J. Bornschein to pivot. The silver lining? His nonprofit has been able to help more felines than ever.

D. J. Bornschein never had pets growing up, but he’s dedicated much of his life to helping cats in need. Through his nonprofit Catsbury Park, Bornschein and company have rescued around 1,000 felines either through adoption or TNR services. D. J. Bornschein, 42, is a person who dives headfirst into topics that pique his interest. The longtime animal empath never had pets growing up, but when he found himself living with two cats after moving in with a girlfriend, he fell in love with felines and quickly came to realize he’d like to work with them for a living. Nearly a decade on, his nonprofit, Catsbury Park (the name a tipoff that it’s based in Asbury Park), has come to the rescue of roughly 1,000 cats, whether through adoption or through TNR—“trap, neuter and release.” Bornschein and his business partner, Jamie Nichols, recently had to reimagine how Catsbury would be run when its storefront had to be shuttered due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Monmouth Health & Life caught up with Bornschein to learn more.

What was the initial plan for Catsbury Park?

My idea was to run the rescue out of a cat café, which opened in September of 2017. We would go to shelters in the area, and if they had friendly, sociable cats that were suitable for communal living, we would bring them into the café and give them a chance to be adopted in a new environment. It was beneficial for the cats and helped relieve the burden on local shelters.

How did the pandemic change how the rescue operates?

Like everyone, we couldn’t open for quite

a while. Catsbury used to get calls all the time from people asking us to come rescue cats or kittens on their property, and we’d deflect them to local shelters because we didn’t have the mental bandwidth to run a foster program and do TNR on top of running the café. But after months of sitting at home, I got bored and decided to take the calls and start going out to rescue them myself. It grew, and our foster program expanded, and we shifted to become an entirely foster/TNR-based organization.

How did you make the tough decision to close the café?

We’re almost entirely donation-based, and as the founder and president of Catsbury Park, I have a responsibility to use those funds to save cats, not to pay my landlord rent on a space we can’t even use. Thinking of the number of cats I could save with the money we were spending on rent, it was a no-brainer and I knew the responsible thing to do was just give it up. We have a loyal donor base—people to this day, and maybe even more now, know that if they make a $5 donation, we’re going to use that $5 in the best possible way to help cats.

So you’ve been able to aid more cats via a foster program than you could at the café due to space limitations?

For sure. Small businesses got affected in different ways and we were not immune to that, but animals still need rescuing, whether there’s a pandemic or not. We were able to shift what we do. The mission of Catsbury Park since Day One, when I was running it out of my house with a couple of kittens, was to help cats in need, and we’re still doing that, maybe even more now.

What’s next for Catsbury Park?

We just signed a lease on a new location. I anticipate this place will be temporary, but it’s a place for us to do adoption events and other fundraisers. It’s also a safe place to bring rescues if we don’t have a foster home lined up. We’ll likely open in early March.

How does it feel to have helped so many cats in just five years?

This work is 1,000 times more rewarding than I ever would have anticipated, but at the same time it’s 1,000 times more difficult in that there’s a lot of emotion tied to it. I wouldn’t change anything—I’m so thankful I get to do this, and I want to continue to do it for as long as I can. At the end of the day, month or year you can step back and say, “I was able to change lives.” It makes the bad days worth it. —Sarah Nolan

“Animals still need rescuing whether there’s a pandemic or not.”