FixNation was founded by the husband and wife team of Mark Dodge and Karn Myers in 2007. We thought you would find it interesting how their story all began…

Mark developed a love of cats when just a child. When he first met Karn, she was also an animal person but having grown up in the country, Karn thought of cats mainly as mousers and barnyard inhabitants. However, once Mark introduced her to the charm of felines, she quickly grew to love them as pets.

As life progressed, Mark and Karn found that virtually every art piece they acquired was in an animal theme, that the charities they most heavily supported were animal or wildlife oriented and that animal issues were very important to them. This progression eventually led them to Best Friends Animal Society, and in 1995 they began contributing to and volunteering for various Best Friends programs in Los Angeles.

In 1998, Karn was working for a special effects company in the movie business. Every morning and every afternoon, she noticed two women doing something at the adjacent property, which turned out to be feeding a colony of feral cats. Karn quickly befriended the two caregivers, and thus began a yearlong education on the vast world of homeless, stray and feral cats. Karn started investigating what could be done for these homeless cats, and through the head of the Best Friends Brigade (another L.A. outreach program of Best Friends), she started developing momentum to actually “do something” about the homeless cat situation in L.A. Mark, a corporate attorney, also joined the effort by helping with Internet research and networking with other individuals of a similar interest.

Their networking and investigation led them to the Feral Cat Coalition in San Diego. They had discovered that their dear friend Kimberly, executive secretary by day and kitty rescuer by night, and her vet friend Dr. Bill Davies were going down to San Diego once a month to volunteer at FCC clinics. Karn and Mark had the idea of duplicating FCC’s program in L.A. They went to two clinics and videotaped FCC for reference purposes. They put together an organizational plan and made a formal proposal to the outreach program directors for Best Friends. After review and a good deal of dialogue, Best Friends adopted them and provided the initial funding to get the program going. Thus was born Best Friends Catnippers, with the first Catnippers clinic held in October 1999.

After ten years of successful Catnippers clinics, Karn and Mark knew that with more funding and a permanent facility, they could potentially make a much larger dent in addressing the homeless cat situation in LA. Thus in 2007, after much planing and fundraising, Mark and Karn launched FixNation, Inc. – a full-time TNR clinic under a new 501(c)(3) organization.

Over the years, Mark and Karn have shared their lives with many beloved kitties, including Seymore, Omar, Maxine, Bentley, Fonzie, Happy, Salsa and their current crew – Wolfgang, Kenya, Shona, Shadow, Magic, Indie, Simon and Mandy. All but the last two, taken in when Mark’s mother passed away in 2006, started their lives as feral kittens.