Dogs Playing for Life

Our mission is to redefine the meaning and importance of quality of life for all sheltered dogs by improving their experience through playgroups and individualized training, resulting in urgent and responsible lifesaving. Tangibly, this means we want to teach and support all shelters to offer daily playgroups, enrichment, and training opportunities to the dogs in their care, so that shelter dogs across the country are guaranteed the chance to thrive. Our goal is for all shelters to offer a strong foundation of enrichment and training to their entire dog population, thereby increasing each shelter’s ability to responsibly and effectively save lives.

Additionally, for the dogs who require advanced behavior modification and ongoing assessments, and are thus too resource intensive for the majority of shelters, our goal is that these dogs are given the opportunity they deserve via our organization’s regional Canine Center model. Our hope is to continue our lifesaving efforts at our Canine Center Florida, while also expanding to other regions of the country in order to provide these opportunities to dogs nationwide.

To further our goal of helping shelters to increase quality of life, lifesaving, and safety in shelters nationwide, our primary strategy is the performance of our highly sought after shelter seminars. Through these shelter seminars, our experienced team communicates with and travels to individual animal shelter organizations in an effort to provide personalized training to implement/strengthen each shelter’s playgroup, enrichment, and training programs. After our initial in-person training seminar, our team stays in regular contact with each organization to offer continuous support, as well as to obtain key performance indicators and survey information in order to measure the effectiveness, impact, and overall experience of our programming.

In addition to our in-person shelter seminars, we offer Mentorships at our partner shelters, the Longmont Humane Society and Austin Pets Alive! where students are taught through an established DPFL curriculum the same core playgroup and handling skills taught in our shelter seminars. For more advanced shelters/students, we also conduct Mentorships at our CCF location where students are taught more in depth skills and techniques. These Mentorships are offered to expand our reach to as many shelter professionals as possible and to make the content as accessible as possible.

In an extra effort to reach a broader audience and offer even greater accessibility to our core Playgroup programming, especially during the Covid-19 Pandemic, we also offer free Playgroup Webinars. Additionally, our Leadership team frequently presents at national conferences and regularly participates in professional networking events.

At our CCF location, we provide advanced behavior modification and placement opportunities, in partnership with each dog’s originating organization, and we conduct thorough analysis of each dog’s pathway and progress, even after adoption, in order to measure our results and to demonstrate a replicable model. Our hope is to expand these efforts to multiple locations around the country in the future, in an effort to establish more regional lifesaving collaborations.

From a subject matter mastery and skill set standpoint, our organization has consistently demonstrated our ability to accomplish these goals. Our seminars, mentorships, webinars, and CCF opportunities are consistently requested, attended, and favorably received and reviewed. Our staff are dedicated, high performing, and constantly in pursuit of continuous improvement and education. Our primary areas of opportunity are in our ability to grow our team in order to reach a higher amount of shelters, and our ability to accept more at-risk dogs at our CCF location without requiring full funding by the originating organization. We have the systems and structure in place to accomplish reaching more people and pets, and look forward to achieving the internal growth and funding opportunities needed to expand our operations and further achieve our goals.

As of the end of 2020, we have visited 291 shelters to perform our in-person shelter seminars. As an example of the approximate amount of dogs served by these seminars, from March 2019 to March 2020 we worked with approximately 1,958 dogs through our shelter seminar programming. For our post-seminar surveys, we have a 60% response rate, with notable questions and results such as:
-Has implementing playgroups improved staff and volunteer morale? 84% yes
-Has implementing playgroups improved the handling skills of your staff and/or volunteers? 90% yes
-Do you feel that your dogs have a higher quality of life while sheltered as a result of playgroups? 99% yes
-Do you feel that you make better adoption matches as a result of implementing playgroups? 98%
-Have you continued running playgroups after your DPFL seminar? 92% yes
-Do you feel that the benefits of playgroups outweigh the risks? 100% yes
Furthermore, for shelters who have conducted playgroups for at least one year, we have seen a 38% decrease in canine length of stay, and a 6% increase in live release-rate.
For our in-person Mentorship and Shadow opportunities, we have served nearly 200 people as of the end of 2020. Over 400 people have attended our recent Playgroup Webinar series, and due to the popular demand we will continue to regularly offer this resource.
At our Canine Center Florida, we have served 233 dogs from 40 shelters. The current overall save rate at CCF is 86 percent and the average LOS for all dogs that have been outcomed since CCF’s inception is 150 days. As many of the dogs who come to CCF are euthanasia candidates at their shelters of origin, we believe these numbers speak to the tremendous dedication and skill of CCF staff.
As we look ahead to the coming year, we are grateful for opportunities discovered and connections forged in 2020 and we are optimistic that 2021 holds limitless possibilities. First, we will continue to safely offer our in-person seminars and we look forward to reaching 300 shelters served in 2021. Next, our plans to expand our webinar offerings include adding instruction in leash work and handling techniques for sheltered dogs. Third, we look forward to developing relationships with new placement partners and finding new pathways for our dogs at CCF. As our subset of “best practice” shelters grows, we will take a special look at the data provided by shelters that are running the Every Dog, Every Day! model and analyze any trends that emerge. As DPFL serves ever more organizations, we seek to understand how shelters use playgroups within the scope of their own unique contexts and resources. We will continue to provide support to individual shelters while working to uncover trends and areas where we can provide additional resources and instruction. As we await brighter days ahead in which we can gather in greater numbers, we are confident that we can continue to improve the experiences of shelter dogs in person, virtually, and on the ground at CCF.