Sep 05, 2024
What is Joybound’s Shelter to Service? Five Questions with Susan Lee Vick, CEO of Joybound People & Pets
In honor of September being Service Dog Awareness Month, we sat down with the CEO of Joybound People & Pets, Susan Lee Vick. Based in Northern California, Joybound People & Pets is a nonprofit and social enterprise that supports the connection between people and pets through a lifetime partnership. Their programs include cat and dog rescue and adoption, training and veterinary care, food and supply assistance, therapy and service-animal programs, and rich learning resources for all pet families.
Joybound’s Pets and Vets program has expanded to include anyone who can benefit from a psychiatric service dog. How did this change come about?
Back in 2011, responding to a lack of mental health support for Veterans, Joybound began a program to share the benefits of the human-animal bond with Veterans. The program, initially called Pets and Vets, first offered free pet adoptions, then free emotional support animals, and eventually trained shelter dogs as psychiatric service dogs and partnered them with Veterans completely free of charge. Since then, Veteran mental health has steadily improved while mental health in the broader population has shown steep declines.
In a 2023 study, 53 percent of Americans reported that mental health is their primary health worry—by far the most prevalent single health concern and double the concerns about cancer. Meanwhile, 87 percent of pet owners report that pets improve their mental well-being, and studies show that people experiencing many mental health conditions can benefit from the specialized skills, love, and companionship a psychiatric service dog provides. For these reasons, and with the strong encouragement of the partners and donors who supported the Pets and Vets program, Joybound now offers psychiatric service dogs to Veterans and others, such as first responders, survivors of violent crime, and anyone who has a referral from a mental health provider.
Joybound’s years doing this life-changing work have shown us that the ideal service dog doesn’t have to be any special breed—just a dog with the heart and temperament for the role. Happily, many program participants prefer the big canine partners, whose disposition and intelligence often make them excellent psychiatric service dogs.
What does this change mean for your Veterans’ program?
Expanding Joybound’s Shelter to Service program to others who need a service dog’s support is a hearty “Yes, and!” Our growing program, in fact, will support more Veterans than ever.
Beyond free service dog placement and support, Joybound now offers other special services and opportunities, such as free vocational training to volunteer foster trainers or through our dog grooming academy, and free veterinary wellness clinics.
How does Shelter to Service work?
The Shelter to Service program offers solutions in three areas: support for human mental health, relief for animal shelters overflowing with harder-to-place large breed dogs, and vocational training, which counts toward credentialing as a Certified Professional Dog Trainer (CPDT).
It all starts in the shelters. Our team regularly visits overcrowded public shelters, searching for healthy and behaviorally sound program candidates. These candidates then undergo assessments both on campus and in a home environment to gauge their qualifications for the program.
Dogs who successfully complete the staff assessment are then partnered with a foster-trainer, who will work with the dog for 12 weeks of “basic” training at home and in weekly onsite classes. If, after the initial 12-week training, a dog doesn’t advance as a service animal, they receive a “career redirect,” becoming available for general adoption in the community, but with the added, highly desirable benefit of three months of training.
At this point, advancing canine candidates are paired with a program participant who has received a medical referral stating the individual would benefit from a psychiatric service animal. Once partnered, the teams train on specific service skills for two weeks of intensive training. This is critically important as symptoms of conditions such as PTSD or TBIs are highly individual. Their canine partners learn to respond to their needs as well as distinct signs of anxiety or stress. After these two weeks, teams continue receiving support through check-ins, additional skill training if required, and overall support to help this amazing relationship thrive over time.
What are some of the greatest challenges for Shelter to Service?
The exploitation of the service dog designation is tremendously damaging to the psychiatric service dog field. When animals who have not received the proper training go into public with a service vest, it is harmful for the animal, and it deteriorates the trust of the people around them.
Another challenge is that people who would make wonderful volunteer foster trainers don’t know how to plug in. There are so many people who want to contribute in meaningful ways, but they just don’t know that programs like Shelter to Service exist or that we are always looking for amazing volunteer trainers. Becoming a foster trainer is a powerful way for members of our community to have a direct positive impact on the lives of an animal and all the human lives that animals will touch while changing the way we think about sourcing service dogs and the power of the human-animal bond in mental and emotional health.
Where do you hope the program will be in one year, five years?
A year from now, we hope to have graduated 60 new human-service animal teams in the San Francisco Bay Area, be ribbon-cutting at Joybound’s first expansion operation in the Midwest and be in the planning stages of our second in the Southwest. These regional operations will include Shelter to Service programs, which, at capacity, will graduate up to 60 teams per year.
In five years, Joybound envisions serving pet families through operations in all six regions of the United States, which would create capacity for up to 360 new service dog teams annually. Partnerships with caring pet products companies, pet trade associations, and shelters that share our commitment to people and pets will make this happen.
