04/05/2026
The new way to volunteer and support GLP!
Over the last 1/2 year the wish to volunteer at GLP has grown exponentially - so much that we’ve been completely unable to respond to all your messages. So we’ve been brewing on how we can better facilitate volunteers at the same time as ensuring we can successfully run the GLP estate. So this is what we’ve come up with - we’re jumping onboard with the idea of volutourism as we can no longer afford to offer free accommodation in our high quality GLP villas, so instead - we’ve decided to offer our villas at a wildly reduced price! We will be offering each villa for 500 euros per week (each villa can house up to 4 people) - usually 2500€ per week, so our volunteers will get a whopping 80% discount!! (outside of high season). Not only will you get to come and help, learn and contribute to our cat rescue work, but you will help support our ability to cover bills and maintain our sanctuary, which after years of financial hardship will help our sanctuary back on it’s paws and feet!
This is in part being made possible because of a truly generous and wonderful cat lover, who miraculously appeared last year when we offered one of the GLP villas for sale. If you’ve followed us for a while you’ll know we already sold one villa and then offered the second for sale to the GLP community as we wanted to ensure CAT LOVERS ONLY. It became impossible for us to keep up financially and I couldn’t be more thrilled to announce I will be co-owning of one of the villas with a cat lady named Cindy, who’s a board member of Animal Allies Rescue Foundation (AARF) - also mama to the late Mittens Aspca Cat of the Year. We met last year when she and her husband stayed in one of our villas last autumn and she has been a truly wonderful supporter of our work. In extension to this, Cindy has incredibly generously offered that all rental income (minus expenses) from the villa that we will be co-owning goes towards the running of GLP. It is hard to put in words how touched we are by this incredibly generous sentiment and obviously this is something - with y’all supporting this new opportunity will help stabilise and grow the work of GLP.
Once our new volunteer program begins our volunteers will be in the safe hands of Gaëlle, our daily caretaker, who will introduce you to our cats and induct you into our daily tasks and care for the sanctuary garden cats, recovery room cats and strays colonies. We will be expecting a daily input of 3 hours per volunteer to help with feeding, cleaning, cuddling, trapping, driving - and maybe more specified tasks for those with more experience. We are particularly interested in volunteers who are not afraid to roll up their sleeves and who will turn up every day with a bright attitude! We take great pride in the calm ecology we’ve created here for both the cats and humans - we believe we can dare go as far as saying that this can be a truly healing and transformative experience!
For anyone wishing to stay in our villas without volunteering we will still be offering the villas at full rental price 2,500 euros during the high season, June, July, August and September. We will soon announce when our voluntourism program will begin and how you can apply. It will run for periods of time outside high season - we intend that our volunteers can even help with olive picking season (November) and other garden and maintenance projects.
We will soon be announcing when we will be open to this new volunteering experience - but expect it to begin autumn this year. Stay tuned for update!
P.s. That’s Cindy & Joan in the photo in comment box.