Message From Our Founder: January

The volunteers at Guardian Angels Medical Service Dogs are critically important. In fact, when I first started the organization, there was little to no funding. Therefore, I depended a lot on what volunteers were willing to do and capable of doing for me. They were a huge asset in many capacities, such as writing thank you notes, helping with cleaning and feeding the dogs, etc. Some of them even became our volunteer founding board members that are still with our organization today.

Eventually, we were generating enough income to hire a trainer and eventually the next person on staff, and so on. As we grew, we were able to hire people for paid positions, but the volunteers never lost their importance to us. In fact, our volunteer program grew, so today – 13 years later, our volunteers help us in a variety of crucial ways.

One of the most important tasks for our volunteers is to attend “Puppy Huggers” every Saturday. The volunteers enjoy coming out to play with the puppies, but more importantly, this is a tremendous aid in helping us to socialize our puppies. It’s important that our dogs get used to all kinds of people – adults and children, clothing, scents, etc., so they never feel strange around any people in public. This is a learning and development stage for our dogs when we are setting solid foundations. Our volunteers play a great role in helping us accomplish this.

In addition, since we’ve become much more sophisticated over the years, we now have what we call Advisory Council Members and Ambassadors.

Our Advisory Council members are professional people that come from different walks of life with various experiences and talents, whether it is finance, accounting, auditing, fundraising, networking, etc. There’s a plethora of different business backgrounds that people can bring to our table. Within these volunteer positions, we have a specialty group that can put their heads together and reviews what we’re doing, what we have in our vision plan, and our strategic plan. They give us their input on what their thoughts and suggestions are, which we take back to the board of directors for discussion.

Our volunteer Ambassadors are people that love to help by being boots on the ground throughout the country to support our events and fundraisers each year. They, as well as the Advisory Council, can directly support the events that are happening in their area, whether it’s Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, or anywhere across the nation.

All these people help us to network through their social media platforms by talking about Guardian Angels to all their friends and family and encouraging them to share further as well.

We have a foster family program designed for them to foster our service dogs in training for a few weeks at a time to help us get more public access exposure and to make sure they have good house manners.

With over 50,000 volunteer hours a year being accumulated, you can see Guardian Angels Medical Service Dogs has lots of different ways to be a part of helping the organization. We hope you will join one of our many programs as we keep our mission moving forward.

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