Prowling around with Lāna‘i Cat Sanctuary

Keoni Vaughn, the longtime executive director of Lāna‘i Cat Sanctuary, has spent much of his life — and career — around animals.

He showed dogs professionally for years as a child and young adult, mostly in Hawai‘i but in other areas of the Mainland, too.

Vaughn told Aloha State Daily that he "kind of went on with my life and then I stumbled across animals again in a different way and started working for the Hawaiian Humane Society on O‘ahu.”

He was hired as an “animal pick-up guy,” picking up stray animals, then worked his way into becoming a humane investigator, which Vaughn says showed him a different side of the spectrum.

“While I was doing that, I really started to take interest in the cat situation and the problems that were going on.”

Eventually, Vaughn became the chief investigator, and later the director of operations and vice president for the humane society.

"When I was in that role, I did a lot of legislative stuff, helping to strengthen the cruelty laws, did a lot of dangerous dog cases, and then also dealt with one of the most contentious topics, which were basically free-roaming cats," he says.

A large portion of the thousands of cats coming into the humane society each year were feral and unsocialized.

In 2014, he had the chance to go work on Lāna‘i, where there was a “very small rescue group” and cat sanctuary.

Early days of the sanctuary

When Lāna‘i Cat Sanctuary got its start in the early aughts, it was a small operation.

"With 25 cats, a horse corral and a dream, Lāna‘i Cat Sanctuary was born," its website reads.

The nonprofit was founded by Kathy Carroll who had moved to the island from Illinois and “was shocked to see the large homeless cat population,” the site states.

“She vowed to stop the suffering of cats struggling to survive and rallied volunteers to help,” the sanctuary website notes.

Meanwhile, Vaughn says a conservation group had discovered a petrel colony and found that free-roaming cats were preying on the endangered birds.

Vaughn says Carroll reached out and was given 30 days to catch and relocate as many cats as she could. She negotiated with the Four Seasons to use a horse corral to house the captured creatures.

There were about 25 to start. Within a year, she had 100 cats, and in 2009, Vaughn says she made a deal to acquire a few acres of land “in the middle of nowhere, a quarter mile away from the airport.”

Then and now

When Vaughn started in 2014, the cat sanctuary had 350 cats, three staff, about $30,000 in reserves and a $100,000 operating budget.

Today, there are more than 760 cats on four acres, 18 staff members and an operating budget of $2.1 million.

Stepping into the role, Vaughn says he had to first take care of the cats but at the same time consider the organization’s revenue sources.

“With only 3,000 people on the island, you really can’t raise that much money off the residents,” he says. “I had to kind of flip the model a little.”

Before he was involved in animal welfare, Vaughn worked for a large travel company on O‘ahu.

“I [thought], well, it is Hawai‘i. It’s a tourist destination. What if we make this a really fun and quirky place to visit, first, and then, once we convince everybody to come here to visit because it’s a fun and quirky place, then we tell them about our mission, we tell them about our nonprofit and hopefully people will appreciate it and donate.

“So that’s what we’ve always tried to do — maintain that fun, quirky place in the middle of nowhere.”

When Vaughn spoke to ASD in September, about 85% of the nonprofit’s funding came through donations — many who donate have never been there — while the remainder comes from a county grant.

But lingering impacts from the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2023 Maui wildfires continue to affect the sanctuary.

Before and after

Prior to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020, Vaughn says the sanctuary was doing well.

Then Covid hit.

Because it was a popular tourist attraction, “and we were bringing all these people into Lāna‘i,” Vaughn says he made the call to close to the public before pandemic-related government mandates were implemented.

“We knew that when we did that, we were going to lose a lot of funding,” he told ASD. “But it was the right thing to do. … We didn’t want to be the reason why Covid came to the island.”

The sanctuary weathered that storm but as visitor counts were recovering, wildfires that ravaged parts of Maui and destroyed much of Lahaina town struck in August 2023, “and tragically, everything came to a halt.”

The harbor in Lahaina was lost. Tourism to Maui dropped in the wake the fires. The ferry between Lāna‘i and Maui moved and rates increased, Vaughn says.

“There’s all these barriers,” Vaughn says. “And if you think about it from a travel industry perspective, it’s already hard enough to try to convince these visitors out of their average five-day stay, to dedicate one full day to come to the cat sanctuary, to get on the ferry and go to Lāna‘i.”

According to Vaughn there were 1,329 visitors to the sanctuary in July. In July 2023, just before the Maui fires, there were 2,033 visitors.

“It’s hard,” he says. “It’s really, really hard. Then we have to shift our mindset on how we’re going to generate that revenue.”

The sanctuary got creative.

For example, you can adopt a cat virtually.

And during Covid, the sanctuary offered people a chance for their own piece of “purr-idise,” renting cat houses for $500 a year.

Vaughn thought it would be amazing to sell 10. They sold 170. A year later, 60% renewed their leases.

“Now it’s an ongoing program for us and it’s just fantastic,” Vaughn says. “That’s one of the many opportunities and creative ways I think that we do try to stay relevant, stay in business, keep up with the operating costs.”

Vaughn says, too, that the sanctuary also does its part to support the local economy. After all, the people who come to visit have to each lunch and want to go shopping, he noted.

“I just feel like it’s a really good thing overall. We’re helping the cats, the birds and the community.”

Adoption and current needs

Vaughn says that any cats brought into the sanctuary that are trapped from a bird nesting area won’t be adopted to anyone locally on island.

Eventually though, about 40% of the sanctuary’s cats become socialized and adoptable. About 100 are adopted out each year, with about 90% of those cats going off-island and out of state.

As for the sanctuary’s biggest needs right now, Vaughn is honest: donations.

“Because our tourism is down because of the fires. Because I think governments are getting a lot stricter with their grants and their funding,” he says. “It’s getting harder and harder. We provide high-quality care and we do a lot with very little, but we still need the donations.”

Learn more about Lāna‘i Cat Sanctuary here.

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Stephanie Salmons can be reached at stephanie@alohastatedaily.com.