Our Story
Meet Sammy - Gabrielle rescued him from the streets of Fishtown, PA in 2004. She found him bleeding & terrified hiding under a car. He stole her heart and while he healed from all his trauma he passed at only 4 years old.
From left to right - Meet Angel (PA street rescue 2004), Steve (NYC street rescue 1998), and Ruby (NJ street rescue 2001). All lived a happy loved healthy life and passed at ripe old ages of 17, 18, and 19 years!
Kitties & Cacao™ did not begin as a business idea.
It did not begin with a nonprofit plan, a polished vision board, or even a name.
It began the way many true things begin.
With heartbreak.
With a question.
With a life that changed the course of another.
In the mid-1990s, my cat Crumpet died of stomach cancer.
And instead of accepting it, I asked the question most people weren’t asking back then:
How does a cat get stomach cancer?
That question became a doorway.
Not just into grief, but into a whole new world I had never been taught to see. I found The Natural Cat and was introduced to raw feeding, holistic care, animal communication, and the realities of an industry built around convenience more than vitality. At the time there was nowhere to buy raw food for cats, so I made it myself by hand. Organs, meat, bone meal, supplements. It was messy, unconventional, and completely life-changing.
That was the beginning.
Not only of how I would care for animals, but of how I would move through life itself.
Toes all grown up in his forever home.
The colony
Then, in 2022, everything changed.
I moved into a farmhouse rental attached to an old barn on more than 40 acres. The landlord said casually, “Whoever lives here usually takes care of the ferals.”
But the people before us had not.
There were about 25 cats living around the property. They were drinking from moldy buckets and eating the cheapest food possible. They were surviving, but barely. And this is the part that matters most: I did not arrive with a grand plan. I arrived with care.
I started with water.
Fresh bowls of clean water and better quality food. Then colloidal silver in the water to support their immune response. Then another upgrade to their food. Organic cans. Grass-fed kibble. Eventually human-grade nutrition mixes.
I watched them. Named them. Learned their personalities. Let them slowly understand that I was safe. Then I opened the mudroom to them so they would have shelter from cold and rain, while still feeding them twice a day.
That was the real beginning of this sanctuary.
Not with a name.
Not with a nonprofit.
With care.
These three babies are happy in their forever homes
Cricket enjoying some quiet time.
The seeker years
At the time I was living in New York City.
I was teaching fitness, bartending, dancing, acting, trying to build a life in the world I thought I was supposed to want. But underneath it all, I felt something was deeply off. The drinking culture. The grind. The disconnection. The way humans treated their own bodies, and the way we treated animals. I kept asking the same question in different forms:
There has to be more than this.
Then another book appeared.
This time it was about raw food for humans and natural healing.
I found it the same way I had found so many important things in my life, by following a pull I did not yet understand.
By the end of 2002 I had changed my life completely. Chronic illness began to heal. Depression lifted. Alcohol disappeared from my life. Sobriety became part of my foundation. And the path that would one day become my work in cellular intelligence and biological coherence began to take form.
The cats kept arriving
Meanwhile, the cats kept finding me.
There was Hannan - a beautiful calico I adopted from a family in NYC because their new born baby was terribly allergic.
Then Steve, the cat tied to a rope and left to starve in a Lower East Side apartment hallway (pictured at the top of the page).
He had chewed through the rope and was crying in the hall. needless to say, he moved right in.
Then more rescues.
Different cities. Different stories.
Some cats were adopted out. Some stayed. Each one taught me something about trust, healing, and what it means to care for a life that cannot explain what it needs in words.
I never set out to “start rescue work.”
It simply kept appearing in front of me, and each time it did, I stepped in.
Meet Toes’s - one of our feral colony kittens. His toes are sticking out of the cubby, hence his name, Toes.
“What began as years of ‘seemingly random rescues’ has evolved into something more. A place that honors the intelligence of animals, the wisdom of nature, and the possibility that sanctuary is for all of us.”
TeeTee the tuxedo kitten no longer a kitten
Stripy rescued from the box 2022 in a grown up picture
The cats started coming inside
At the same time, the inside story was beginning too.
I had arrived with my three rescues from 2015. Then, within weeks, a young tuxedo kitten simply walked into the house like she belonged there. My sons slept on the bathroom floor with her until I could get her vetted.
Then came Stripy. I overheard someone at a pet store talking about leaving a kitten in a box at the police station. He was only weeks old, malnourished, nearly blind, his eyes sealed shut with infection. I brought him home and cared for him the way I had learned to care for bodies in need of repair: colloidal silver, homemade ozonated coconut oil, proper nourishment, consistency, presence. Slowly, his eyes opened. He healed. He can still only see partially, but he can see. Later, when he had a terrible infected wound, I treated that too and watched it close within two weeks.
By then it was already clear that this was no longer just about helping a few cats.
Something bigger was taking shape.
Anton, Kiki, above and Dora to the right are all siblings rescued in 2014
Little’s
The Pregnant Mom That Changed Everything
Then came the moment I will never forget.
The matriarch of the colony had already raised her litter, but two of her daughters became pregnant very young. I watched, waited, and prayed because I had no idea how I was going to get these feral pregnant cats safely inside before the cycle repeated itself.
One of them was Littles.
She was due any day, and I kept asking for guidance. As God would have it, the morning she was due to give birth, she came to my door. Not trapped. Not chased.
She came to me.
I had already prepared a crate just in case.
I picked her up, brought her inside, and within an hour she gave birth to five kittens safely inside the house.
That moment changed everything.
It felt like trust. Like God.
Like timing. Like responsibility being handed over rather than taken.
It was no longer just a colony outside.
Now there were newborn kittens, indoor rescues, more pregnancies, and a level of responsibility that made it impossible to pretend this was temporary.
Sweet Littles - she was the runt of the litter in the outside colony. That’s why I named her Littles - plus I was running out of ideas with a 25 cat colony.
Seeing the rescue system up close
As the colony grew, I reached out for help.
I worked with experienced rescuers and trappers. I listened. I learned. I did the best I could to get cats trapped, spayed, and neutered But with an outside colony of 25 time was ticking. One organization could only take two cats every few months and I was about to have 5 more nursing moms. So I kept reaching out for more support until, through a network of people, I was finally able to get more than fifteen cats in for spay and neuter surgeries, on top of the many I had already handled.
That is when I saw the rescue system up close.
Cars full of traps. Lines of cats waiting every day.
Thousands of animals.
Not enough resources.
People doing exhausting, essential work under impossible conditions.
I came away with even more respect for the people in rescue, especially those working in urban environments where the trauma is immense.
I also came away with a deeper question…
What would it look like to create a model that integrated rescue with regeneration?
Not just emergency response. Not just survival. But true healing environments for animals.
Environments that honor nutrition, stress reduction, biology, and the intelligence of the animals themselves.
That question became part of the fabric this sanctuary continues to build upon.
Where cacao entered the picture
Cacao had already been part of my life for years.
I have worked with cacao for over two decades. It came to me at the beginning of my own healing journey and became a daily ritual, a heart opener, an alchemical friend. Long before “cacao ceremonies” became mainstream, I was making heirloom raw chocolate, creating cacao elixirs, and gathering people around this plant in ways that felt intimate, nourishing, and deeply alive.
At some point, after I had already adopted out more than thirty cats, a playful idea came to me:
What if people could come here, drink cacao, sit with the cats, and let their kitty choose them.
That is when the name appeared.
At first it felt warm, joyful, almost magical. But over time something deeper revealed itself.
Adoption was not the heart of this mission.
Sanctuary was.
And so it is, Kitties & Cacao™ - A Holistic Cat Sanctuary & Health Salon.
A defining moment
There were many moments when I realized this had become something much larger than I had expected.
At one point there were five nursing mothers with six kittens each. Thirty newborn lives!
Then there were adoptions, and I noticed over and over again that the cats seemed to choose their people. Someone would arrive for one kitten, and that kitten would ignore them completely while another cat made the choice instead.
But the deepest lesson came later.
One of our twin gingers, Sol, was adopted. I did not yet understand how bonded he was with another cat named Safflower. When Sol left, Safflower scream-cried at the door for three straight days and nights. Sol’s brother hid in fear for days. In that moment I learned something I could never unsee:
A colony is not just a group of individual animals.
It is a living social system.
From then on, my adoption philosophy changed.
I would only adopt out fresh rescues or litters who had not yet fully integrated into the colony. Once a cat had become part of the family structure inside the sanctuary, they were home.
That was the moment the vision for Kitties & Cacao™ became fully clear to me.
Not a cat café.
Not an adoption concept.
A sanctuary.
A place where animals could live in safety, nourishment, and relationship.
AND
A place where humans could come into that field, sit quietly, drink cacao, and remember what compassion feels like.
What Kitties & Cacao™ is now
Today, Kitties & Cacao™ is still in its early form, but it is very real.
It is a lived-in, loved-in sanctuary in progress. A farmhouse reshaped by rescue. A mudroom that became refuge. A colony both outside and inside. A family home that has been lovingly adapted to support a growing sanctuary in its early stages.
And beneath all of it is the same thread that started decades ago with one unbearable question:
How does a living being lose coherence.
And what conditions help life return.
Kitties & Cacao™ is my answer to that question.
It is a sanctuary being built from rescue, relationship, biological coherence, and the belief that healing happens best in the right conditions.
It is for the cats, yes.
But it is also for people.
For the people who want to remember what compassion feels like in the body.
For the people who long to be closer to animals, nature, and a more connected way of living.
For the people who understand that sanctuary is not only something we create for other beings, but something we are also being invited to enter ourselves.
This is only the beginning.
If you would like to support the mission, learn more about the vision, or explore the deeper philosophy behind this work, those doors are open.
With Love & Cacao,
Gabrielle
