Kitten Cam Upgrade

Help us bring shelter kittens into new homes in reality and digitally.

Our Story

A few years back we said goodbye to our friend and cat Avocado, named for his amazing green eyes. Amanda was not ready to get a new cat of her own but had toyed with the idea of fostering and watched our friend Brigette foster for a while. While skimming through a neighborhood app, Amanda came across a post, a call for a foster to help relocate some kittens that had born in their backyard. Amanda responded and from that, the wheels were set in motion.

When she was finally ready she asked me if we could start fostering, I said "Yes, as long as I can livestream it" 

Begrudgingly she agreed and the rest is history. Our first fosters were two amazing tabbies Cloudy and Stormy.

Amanda didn't really like or get the live stream at first, but once the chat became active and our little community grew she was on board. We have been sharing our foster journey since 2017. We started on Facebook but soon after Phil Ranta reached out to me from Mobcrush and when I learned about multicasting I immediately jumped on it. I connected out facebook, and youtube and since the options were there I made a Twitch and Mixer account. I never expected these "gaming" sites to do much of anything. But now not even a year in our Mixer has grown to 7000+ amazing followers and across all platforms 11k+

Our community has been CLAWSOME at donating to support the kittens.

We flat out are only able to save as many kittens as we have because of donations through Streamlabs and our Amazon Wishlist from the community. We are able to save 3 to 4 times more kittens than we could on my salary alone.

Why Go Fund Me?
As I mentioned we already raise funds for the kitties through Streamlabs and we wanted to make sure there was a distinct separation. All the Streamlabs money will only ever go toward the kittens. This GoFundMe is specifically for bring our viewers better streaming experiences.


Where will the Money Go?

For over 2 years we've put a lot of demands on a very limited mini pc. It's been great but we hit large chunks of time where the GPU will get overloaded and the stream just freezes something for hours. Which is a very bad experience. 

It's time to upgrade to a machine that can really handle multiple cameras streaming 24/7 for extended periods of time!

And maybe even go above and beyond that!

TimeLine
Right now we're simply hoping to get the basics that'll let us grow and scale our streaming project. 
This means a computer with at least a quad-core and decent graphics card as well as several USB ports to plug-in cameras.

Phase 1 of this fundraiser starts now and goes till Oct 1st. Whatever amount of money we raise between now and then will be the base computer we buy. The fundraiser will remain open and any donations earned will be then used to upgrade that computer bit by bit.

What Fostering Means to us

We are a family of animal lovers, Amanda and I have both had dogs and cats in our lives consistently. Our daughters have never known a house without pets. Iris has even said she wants to be a vet when she grows up, though good chance it'll be to take care of Sea Turtles not kittens. (but that's cool too, and if it's possible I'll stream it).

Fostering has been a labor of love, having all these cuties come through our door and knowing we're giving them a chance at a life that was surely going to be taken away is honestly a bit overwhelming to think about. Almost all of our fosters are very young kittens, that have been pulled from shelters where they would have been put down.

We not only get to see first hand that these fluffballs end up in loving homes, but Amanda gets to meet the potential adopters, visit their home and make the final decision. Because of the very personal nature of the Kitten Rescue adoption process, we also hear back from quite a few of our past adopters and get updates and pictures of all the cuteness!

How grateful we are for all the help interest and growth from the community.

I can't say enough about how grateful we've been for the help of our 'Kitten Krew', the community that has grown from the viewers of the live stream have been amazingly supportive. From chipping in with little donations here and there and sending bags and palettes of food from our wishlist to shipping us a camera all the way from Australia, the Kitten Krew has made what we do more than just fun, but truly a mission. 

What if we raise more than we need.

Obviously, with the price of tech these days, there's almost no limit to the amount of expanding and upgrading we could do. However, our needs are realistic and simple.

For starters, we're looking for enough to get a basic tower PC that's better than the mini PC we have and capable of being upgraded in the future. Being able to scale up is a major necessity. But first and foremost being able to provide our viewers and supporters with an HD stream that doesn't freeze and maybe minimize the lag is our first goal.

After that, we'll be looking to upgrade to a bigger and better CPU and Graphics card to allow for more interactive tools down the road. 

And finally, if we meet our dreams of putting together an amazing Streaming PC, we'll move on to upgrading our surrounding tech; new cameras, interactive toys for the kittens and viewers and more.

I'll have a Tiered Goal for the PC builds posted asap.

Thank you all for your support, 
-Sam Proof


PC BUILD TIER ONE - $900
AMD Ryzen 5 3400G
Radeon RX Vega 11
8GB DDR4 Memory
2TB 7200RPM Storage
Windows 10

and other stuff: Stickers, Kitten Paw Prints and more

PC BUILD TIER TWO - $1250
Intel Core i7 9700F
NVIDIA GTX 1650 4GB
8GB DDR4 Memory
240GB Solid State Drive
2TB 7200RPM Storage
Windows 10

and other stuff: T-shirts, Interactive Treat dispenser and more

Stretch Goals - Part 1! Should we hit our Tier 1 goal for a our base streaming PC we've created some clawver stretch goals to reward the community (mostly at Sam's expense)

And more stretch goals to come



Ok but what if I just want to donate money to the kittens?

That's totally Pawsome and we want to be clear that this GoFundMe is for the Kitten cam tech only.

You can donate money that WILL ONLY BE USED FOR KITTENS via paypal or credit card through Streamlabs 
OR you can order kitten related items off our Amazon Wishlist