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Gayle Woods
520-742-0338
P.O. Box 91157
Tucson, AZ
85742-1157
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Broadening Our Mission

Friday, May 2, 2008

Since our last news entry on March 5, 2008, Second Chance has received official word from the Arizona Department of Corrections, that the State of Arizona will no longer be pursuing a prison/dog program. Although this news is most disheartening, we are already in the process of exploring alternative options in an ongoing effort to provide a much needed service to the surrounding community. Even prior to this decision, Second Chance members were actively discussing the idea of expanding our program for two reasons: First, to be able to serve more people, and second, to create a more stable existence for the organization in general, one in which we do not have to rely exclusively on a single partnering group in order to remain operational. Unlike most prison/dog programs, we are not a free-standing rescue organization or service dog organization, which leaves our position more vulnerable. If, for whatever reason, our partnership was dissolved, we would be left without a viable program. We recognized, from the very beginning, that this was one of the risk factors inherent to our organization and that we would need to address broadening our operation at some point. So even though this latest decision by the Department of Corrections came as a surprise, we had already been lining up some other possibilities.

We are currently in the process of exploring the possibility of forming a partnership with the local Veterans Administration, to potentially have some of the veterans train rescue dogs for people with disabilities. This is a fairly new concept which is gradually surfacing across the country and is receiving a good deal of attention from the media. We have also discussed the possibility of partnering with the Juvenile Detention Center, with the goal in mind to work with troubled teens to train dogs in Basic Obedience. We are still going to pursue a prison/dog program with the State, only this time from a legislative perspective, as opposed to dealing directly with the Arizona Department of Corrections. The bottom line is that we are not giving up. We have a gap within our community between "needs" and "resources."

The needs:

  1. Numerous unwanted dogs who need to find loving homes
  2. Individuals with disabilities who need a well trained service or therapy dog
  3. Special needs populations who could benefit therapeutically from training the unwanted dogs for others with special needs.

In essence, the resources are the very needs themselves:

  1. Unwanted dogs
  2. Veterans with PTSD
  3. Troubled teens
  4. Prison inmates
  5. The list could go on and on...

Second Chance, would serve as the catalyst to empower the "needs" population to become their own "resources" by bridging this gap and making it a win-win situation benefiting all entities involved.

Because our mission will be expanding, we will be changing our name. Please continue to check back with us, as we keep you apprised of our situation and our new name.

Effective immediately, we have already changed our website domain name to the following: www.secondchancecanineprogram.org.