Felius Cat Café and Rescue is moving to a new location where it can help more animals and be more accessible to the public.

Its new home will be at 5015 Dodge St., with the new site tentatively scheduled to open in early 2024. The café has been located at 522 S. 24th St. for the past five years.

President Bre Phelan said play space, where visitors mix with cats available for adoption, will grow from 250 to 1,500 square feet. There also will be room for offices, kennels and a free supply pantry in the lower level of the three-story building.

There will be other tenants in the building, including a coffee café.

Phelan said the move will allow Felius to hyper focus on saving cats in the community, which it already has been doing successfully for several years.

“We just hit our 1,000th adoption earlier this month,” Phelan said. “We’re super excited about that milestone. We’ve helped over 700 cats in our trap-neuter-release program, preventing more than 700,000 kittens from being born over seven years.”

The move is the next stage for Felius, she said.

The larger play space will allow the organization to host and educate larger groups, from seniors to youngsters, about cats and their needs. A private space will be available for parties and company outings.

The more central location will mean that people from downtown can reach the café as easily as those farther west.

“We’ll be more visible in the community,” Phelan said. “With our new location, our hope is that we’ll be more of a centerpiece on why TNR is so important and getting the community involved with trapping and transporting and getting more vets on board to help with those surgeries.”

The kennels, she said, will provide a triage area for cats that have been injured or are ill or have no place else to go. Handling those types of requests has been very challenging for animal rescue groups in Omaha, Phelan said. Foster homes are full.

With contributions from the public, Felius hopes to provide free supplies for those in need at its pantry, especially the many people who are financially burdened by feeding the large feral cat population in Omaha.

Since the low-cost spay and neuter clinic at Nebraska Humane Society was closed, Phelan said kitten season no longer just occurs in the spring. It’s become a more year-round problem.

“Without that resource, rescue organizations have been scrambling to find vets that will spay and neuter TNR cats. But many of them won’t take on the liability of handling feral cats, understandably so,” Phelan said. “It’s really left small rescue organizations with the task of coming up with new programs to help stem the number of community cats on the street in a humane way.”

In the past, she said, the Humane Society not only helped control the feral cat population through the clinic, but it was also a place for rescue organizations to turn to when they were full.

Because the NHS is also often filled to capacity itself and has had to turn away animals, that is no longer the case.

“I understand the Humane Society does a lot of amazing work in our community; it’s just that it had to cut back on what had previously been a safety net,” Phelan said.

Phelan said contributions from the public will fund the move, which she estimates will cost Felius about $365,000. The group has raised $50,000.

It is looking for sponsors and individual donations. Go to felius.org.

“Every little bit helps,” she said. “Felius is a completely unique community space within our state that brings together individuals in a way that they can connect with rescue cats and really form a group of volunteers to mobilize on the feral cat problem.”

Photos: Felius Cat Cafe moving to larger location