Israel Guide Dog Center for the Blind

The Israel Guide Dog Center seeks to provide specially trained dogs as Guide Dogs for the blind, Service Dogs for Veterans living with PTSD as a result of their military exprience, and Emotion Support Dogs for children on the autism spectrum and with special needs. Because of supporters around the world, our dogs become life-changing parters providing independence, mobility, and companionship to Israelis in need. All of our dogs go on to help someone!

To enhance the amazing relationship between the four-legged and the two legged (our dogs and our cli

Goal One: To increase the number of "Partnerships" we create. Guide Dogs, PTSD Service Dogs and Emotional Support dogs.

Goal Two: Improve the quality of our working dogs - which may mean adjusting their career paths and evaluating success metrics.

Goal Three: Work with Government agencies to improve accessibility for Service Dogs to enter public spaces. (There is no ADA in Israel.)

We encourage our staff to attend as many leadership forums and professional development events as possible. Of course with Covid, these were virtual, but also easier to attend as travel was not required. We feel strongly that attending these events and networking to learn about the latest developments keeps our staff sharp and focused on innovation, and ways it can be adapted and applied to our organization.

Covid restrictions were our biggest and most unexpected challenge. Israel closed all public transportation and placed many of our clients in a dangerous position, as they needed public transportation to get food and medicine for themselves and their dogs. We immediately mobilized our staff (who are considered essential workers) to ensure the basic needs of all our clients was being met. We also had many dogs in the training pipeline, and were faced with challenges about how to safely continue training them and keeping their skills sharp while we waited to place them with clients in need. We developed a "shift bubble" system, assigning certain staff members to work in three separate shifts - to limit potential exposure of the various teams. This system was very successful -none of our teams were ever infected. Our final challenge was getting the dogs out to the clients. We normally bring clients to train in-house in classes of six for three weeks at a time. This was not possible, so when restrictions were finally eased, we began taking the dogs to our client's homes for one-on-one training. This was very difficult from a logistics standpoint and cost us a great deal more - but we did not want to let the valuable resource (trained dogs) go to waste. In the end, we placed 88 dogs with clients who are blind, suffering from PTSD or for children with autism as emotional support dogs. We placed more dogs in 2020 than we had in 2019 - all thanks to the tireless efforts of our amazing staff.