PRESS

"One can respond to sadness and tragedy in two primary ways: to settle in with it and be miserable, or to make something beautiful and hope it catches on. Phaedra Barratt could see only one of those options. In 2012, she had moved from London to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, with her husband, her two year old daughter, two cats, and three suitcases. While she had never been there before, she knew there was something better waiting for them. “Better for them” came in the unexpected form of a semi-cross-eyed Oriental Shorthair cat with a voice like an old barn door. He became an Instagram phenomenon, featured on Buzzfeed Animals and The Dodo. Suddenly, Phaedra found herself (@balam_says) with tens of thousands of followers, with numbers increasing at every new post. She currently has nearly 300,000 followers across three sites. Rather than monetize her pages for personal gain, she decided to use these platforms to heal the planet at a grassroots level, creating the 501(c)3 non-profit Balam Foundation to rescue, TNR, and, in every case possible, re-home the thousands of Mexican street cats suffering with overpopulation, starvation, and disease. She saw social media as a way to reach out to her worldwide followers not only for donations, but for potential loving forever homes for these neglected, ignored, and sometimes abused cats. She conjured out of nothing a conduit to get once-hopeless animals out of desolation and into beautiful, happy American and Canadian homes. With the idea being that she ultimately would love to put herself out of business by ending the suffering of cats, she is repairing not only the lives of the cats she helps, but the people who are fortunate enough to end up with one of them."