My Nonprofit Reviews

The experience our family had was so traumatic that I took a look at their Facebook page just to see if there were any other people of color who had adopted (which there weren’t many if any - and lo and behold the only other negative review was from a POC woman also with a negative experience. I have never in my adult life ever been in a situation so incredibly, dismissive, rude, and outright discriminatory. I preface the following story by saying that I am half white, so I’d like to think that I’m a neutral party and only complain when the situation has been such an extreme incident that I had no other choice.

After ignoring us for over an hour, the wife comes out and gives a very rude and very long and very passive aggressive speech about how we shouldn’t just “stare” at the cats and interact with them. Mind you - for the entire time she was in there giving the white family VIP service for the last hour and a half - we had been interacting with the cats pretty heavily. One of the cats in particular was EXTREMELY stressed due to the very new and very cluttered environment of their home, as well as all the hovering eyes, so for me to perform for this woman at the expense of the little kittens anxiety - when she clearly had no intentions of letting the cats go with us seemed cruel and pointless. I instantly knew where this was going and preferred not to go through the motions, my 6’4 husband decided to climb in the cage to appease her which made me even more upset bc we had just been playing with the cats but he felt he needed to do that to appease her and to me if felt that the standard for ‘us’ vs the other family was set up to perform for her. Rather than coming out with a greeting like she did for the other family, she came out arms crossed, sour faced, with the passive aggressive speech in hand. I might also add that we live one street over from this woman - so it’s not like we live in a bad neighborhood or if they wanted to do a home check on the cats, that it would be particularly difficult. To add insult to injury - her process is for you to purchase all the kitty supplies BEFORE meeting the cats. So on top of the $300 adoption fee - we shelled out another $200+ on kitty supplies prematurely. I expressed via email that this process didn’t seem practical considering we hadn’t met the cats yet and if we didn’t get the cats we would have prematurely bought unnecessary items and wasted time and a lot of money. (Which is exactly what happened) Our appointment was at 7pm which I told her I’d be coming after work (up until this point there had been no mention of supplies - it was just a “meeting”) she sent the email at 10am the day of, meaning that I had to get all the cat care items between leaving work and arriving for the appoint - she stated to arrive with a case “big enough” for two cats. So I stopped by the pet store last minute and bought all the things two cats needed, carrying case, litter box, food, toy, blanket for inside the case, etc. I’d recommend not buying anything until the meet and greet has been established even if you are “approved” as we supposedly were.

This place made us very uncomfortable from the initial interaction all the way through the last second of our stay which was about an hour and a half in total and I would recommend that if you are a POC that you should probably go to a more reputable non profit and not some woman’s house in Stafford. Towards the end of the meet I started to just call her out on it outright - but figured it wasn’t worth the trouble so we left - but my spirit just didn’t sit right with the entirety of the situation so I felt it my duty to warn anyone else of color that this is probably not the safest space in hopes of sparing you the same experience. We saw the very stark difference in treatment from the other family that arrived before us vs how we were treated and spoken to by her. She won’t take the time to get to know you, you will not be greeted, and you will definitely be watched with judging eyes which will create a very tense and awkward energy which is compounded by the fact that you’re in her house. The foster mom of the cats we were to receive, and the husband of the household were nice enough at FIRST, but unfortunately switched up after speaking to the woman of the home. I purposely waited some weeks before posting this review because I wanted to be absolutely sure I still felt this way before posting my family’s experience.