It’s that time of year again when people reflect on the year that has passed and new aspirations and goals are made for the upcoming new year. Matt and I are no different and we are doing this for ourselves and for Growing Up Guide Pup.
Next month is our 10 year anniversary of the creation of Growing Up Guide Pup, and what a wild ride the last 10 years has been. We have helped raised 11 puppies, Ricki, Chanel, Pilaf, Spring, Gabrielle, Patrick, Arturo, Penny, Oscar, Scarlett, and Pixie. We had four of them graduate, one become a K9 officer, five career changed, and one is still training. We included our followers on the discovery, treatment, and loss of our personal dog (our third puppy Eli who was career changed from Guide Dogs for the Blind) to cancer. We raised for three different organizations and our current puppy on our own. We fostered a litter of three orphan puppies and donated them to Brigadoon Service Dogs. We whelped a litter of nine poodle puppies and helped prepare them for going into puppy raisers homes. We were accepted in web series festivals around the world and won many awards as well. We shared our excitement, challenges, triumphs, disappointments, and heartbreaks for the whole world to see.
When Matt and I first started this journey we had no idea of what would come or where the journey would take us. We started from an idea to take my love of puppy raising and combining Matt’s love of filmmaker and the result was a video blog that became our non-profit organization.
Every week we put out a new episode documenting what we were going through as a guide dog puppy raiser and sharing the experience with the public on YouTube. Everyone got to watch our puppy Ricki grow up as we navigated the challenges and accomplishments from the day we got her until the day she was returned.
The response was more than I anticipated. Sure I thought people would enjoy watching a cute puppy grow up, but I was not expecting to make an impact like we did. After a few short months we started getting messages from people that because of watching our videos they decided to raise a guide dog puppy. Other messages were from people who were on the fence about getting a guide dog, but after watching how one was raised it helped them decide that a guide dog might be for them. The response from people watching us raise Ricki was so positive that it fueled us to do it again with the next puppy.
It was very clear that we had built a following and that we were making an impact and after our second season of the web series we decided to take what we had built to the next level and create a non profit organization.
We learned how to file the paperwork needed, recruited some well respected friends to form a board of directors and decided on a mission statement, to educate the public on service dog etiquette, law, and puppy raising. I will admit that we were not exactly sure what we were doing, but we were learning as we grew and we were making an impact. We built a website, and rebuilt it a few times, built up a brand on a few social media sites, did some talks with the community, created a service dog quiz for public events to help educate people in a fun way, created other education materials to hand out to the public, and continued to create videos while enhancing the quality and information.
For more details on our products and services, please feel free to visit us at: service dog, service dog law, service dog etiquette, service dog puppy raiser, guide dog.