Therapy dogs: brightening up campus one tail wag at a time
On January 21 Union Adventist University received a visit from some furry friends. At least once a semester UAU’s Student Health Team partners with Healing Heart Therapy Dogs, a local non-profit organization and invites dog therapy teams to come visit campus. While Union has been fostering this partnership for many years, Benji Bollinger, Union’s Mental Health Coordinator, decided to continue the tradition when he took up his new position. He shared this about his mission, “Personally, I love dogs and in my previous career as a Special Education Teacher I used to have them come to my classroom weekly. There are a lot of benefits to having animals around. So, I definitely want to keep the dogs coming to campus”.
The mission of Healing Heart Therapy Dogs is, “to strengthen the human-companion animal bond by allowing our dogs to heal people's hearts”. There are many teams and volunteers that help make their work possible. Furthermore, the organization is run through membership support. This volunteer work and donorship allows the organization to reach rehabilitation centers, nursing homes, hospitals, assisted living centers, community centers, inpatient and outpatient mental health programs, retirement communities, hospice programs, college campuses, schools, and many more places in which their trained therapy dogs can “help to transform a life of discouragement, fear, and sadness into one of happiness, independence and hope”.
Deb Lambrecht, the owner of Xena, a therapy dog of 3 years, shared their story and how they got into dog therapy. “She had the temperment for it. She’s a rescue and as you can tell she’s pretty chill. The other dogs I’ve had were good tempered and trained, but I just never thought about it before. And for some reason I was looking at her going, “you know you’d be a great therapy dog”. I always have the Canine Good Citizen Training for my dogs, so we did that and then I got a hold of Healing Hearts and said, “Hey, we’re interested”. She did some training with them. Afterwards she passed all the tests and had a lot of fun”.
The opportunity to destress through animal therapy has proven to be beneficial to many patients and students alike. For future opportunities to meet some new furry friends keep an eye on UGroups for an announcement regarding their next visit. For more information about the Healing Heart organization visit healinghearttherapydogs.org or for more information about seeing these therapy teams on campus reach out to benji.bollinger@uau.edu.
By: Olivia Sweet