TERRA Environmental Research Institute High School junior Gracie Robles fostered her first cat when she was in sixth grade.
“My brother was coming home from school and the cat was in the middle of the street,” she says. “He ran out and grabbed it. That was the one we fostered but we ended up keeping it. He was my foster failure.”
Her goal as a foster mom is to get the cats and kittens adopted. She has already fostered nine cats.
She also does TNR, which is a trap and release program. She takes the feral cat to her vet and has it fixed and releases the cat the next day.
Robles volunteers with the Cat Network, a cat rescue organization that takes adoptable cats to PetSmart at the Colonial Palms Shopping Center.
“That’s how I started with the Cat Network,” she says. “I would always go when I would see the cats and I always wanted to help out.”
She started volunteering with the Cat Network in eighth grade and continues to go most Saturdays. She takes some of her fosters there to be adopted but some of her fosters find forever homes even before she’s going to take them to PetSmart.
“Sometimes I have friends who are already interested in adopting so I adopt it to them,” she says.
She has a cat she lovingly calls a stinker. She took him to PetSmart but he didn’t want to be there and he wasn’t cooperative. When she took him home, he started throwing up so she took him to the vet only to find out that the cat gets so upset when meeting someone new that he throws up. The rest of the time he’s well behaved and wonderful.
She is fostering a five-week-old kitten right now. This is the youngest cat she has fostered. He was a week-and-a-half when she got him and she had to feed him every few hours. He will be adopted when he is older.
She and her family fostered a dog once but ended up adopting him. So now she sticks to fostering cats.
Robles tries to foster one cat at a time but she once rescued a mother cat and her three four-week-old kittens. She rescued them just two days before Hurricane Irma. Her family was planning to evacuate but couldn’t because of the cats. All four cats have now been adopted.
The mother and one kitten went to her grandmother and the other two kittens went to another family.
Along with rescuing cats, Robles volunteers as a buddy with the Miracle League, the baseball league for kids and young adults with special needs.
“The one I volunteer at is Tamiami where they have a rubberized field for wheelchairs,” she says.
She volunteers at all three games each Saturday during the season.
Summertime, Robles volunteers once a week at the Aussie Animal Hospital, the vet that she takes her cats to.
At TERRA, Robles is vice president of the Environmental Club. The club recently sponsored a clean-up of the garden the environmental classes grow. They had 40 volunteers who planted and weeded the garden.
The club also collects the uneaten fruits during lunchtime and distributes them to other students to reduce food waste.
She takes dance at school. She recently took part in the Dance Show doing a solo tap dance and dancing a Hip-Hop number with her class.
Outside of school she takes classes at the Miami Youth Ballet. Currently she is focusing on tap and jazz but would like to return to ballet when she has more time.
Linda Bernfeld Rodriguez
