cerebral palsy

Instinct to Serve: CCI Dogs Transform Special Lives

Jacob and Yerba are best friends. When they met three years ago, Yerba was immediately drawn to Jacob. Jacob knew it, too, when Yerba rolled on her back and licked his face.

As I’m sure you’ve guessed, Yerba and Jacob are no ordinary couple. Jacob is a 14-year-old boy living with autism and cerebral palsy and Yerba is a yellow Labrador retriever carefully bred and trained to help Jacob navigate the life that is often so scary and confusing for him.

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CCI skilled companion dog Yerba licks Jacob’s ear as they snuggle with Jacob’s mom, Candice, at home.

Their story began in 2012 when Jacob and his mother, Candice, went to a local park. There they met a young girl with Down syndrome and autism who had a “skilled companion” dog provided free by Canine Companions for Independence (CCI).

After researching CCI, Candice applied for a dog for Jacob, hoping it would help him with his anxiety and other social challenges. Nearly two years later, Jacob and Yerba met and their friendship has made an amazing difference for Jacob.

“He’s gained so much independence since he got her,” says Candice. “She knows her role and can sense when he needs her.”

Navigating life together

Jacob transitioned from elementary to middle school just a few weeks after he got Yerba. Stressful for even the most socially skilled 11-year-old, the move was scary and intimidating for Jacob. With Yerba at his side he was able to integrate much more easily. “After the first week, the other kids knew Jacob and Yerba by name,” says Candice, noting that people are curious about Yerba, who wears a special vest. Jacob has learned to answer strangers’ questions about her, building his confidence.

That extra attention can, however, be too much for him at times. Candice recalled a reunion with the person who raised Yerba as a puppy. The gathering with multiple dogs drew a crowd, and Jacob immediately became anxious and withdrew. Yerba sensed his anxiety and instinctively went to him, calming him and shielding him from the crowd.

She also recalled how helpful Yerba was when Jacob was hospitalized for pneumonia. Jacob’s grandmother brought Yerba along to the hospital when she visited him, keeping him calm so he could use his energy to heal. “He sits next to Yerba and puts his hand on her. It really calms him,” says Candice.

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Yerba is always there for Jacob, even when he must be hospitalized for pneumonia.

Power to help

I was introduced to the CCI way by Sharon Mosbaugh, a volunteer “breeder caretaker” in Danville, CA. Sharon takes care of Salinas, a female breeder dog, and tends her litters. Sharon introduced me to Salinas and her litter of five pups, just days old. Sharon cares for them for their first eight weeks, when they are sent to volunteer “puppy raisers” who provide care and socialization and teach them basic obedience skills for the next 16-18 months.

I got to hold one of the tiny pups and couldn’t understand how Sharon could care for litter after litter and then let them all go. “How can I not give them up?” she asked. “When you see the power they have to help others, it’s really magical.”

At 18-20 months, the young dogs are sent to one of six regional training centers across the U.S. where they receive extensive training to serve in one of four specialized roles:

  • Service dogs, who assist adults with disabilities by performing daily tasks
  • Hearing dogs, who alert their partners, who are deaf or hard of hearing, to important sounds
  • Facility dogs, who work with clients with special needs at places such as schools, court houses, and hospitals, and
  • Skilled companions, like Yerba, who enhance independence for children and adults with physical, cognitive, and developmental disabilities
Salinas_litter_CCI

CCI breeder dog Salinas quietly nurses her pups just days after they were born in the home of breeder caretaker Sharon Mosbaugh.

Science and service meet at CCI

Sharon explained that breeder dogs, like Salinas, are the best of the best in terms of temperament and other traits required to provide the services clients require. All breeding occurs within 90 miles of CCI headquarters in Santa Rosa, CA, to maintain the control and consistency so important to the process.

Since its beginnings in 1975, CCI has placed more than 5,000 dogs across the U.S. Many more have been born into the program, but not all are cut out for the work ahead. “They won’t send a dog out to work unless they are absolutely certain of what it will do,” says Sharon.

She says that CCI is closely involved in every stage of the dog’s life to be certain it receives quality care and provides quality service. When a dog is retired, CCI places it with a loving owner and the client may apply for another dog.

CCI’s scientific approach attracts premier researchers who team with CCI to learn about the traits that make CCI dogs special. The organization is working with a consortium of canine research centers from Emory University, Georgia Tech, the University of California at Berkeley, and Dog Star Technologies on a study focused on the reward center of the canine brain.

Canine Companions Puppy

A CCI pup learns the basics with a puppy raiser before moving on to specialized training. (CCI photo)

The dogs just know

One of the most special traits of the CCI dogs is their sense for who needs help. “I’ve watched it work,” says Sharon, who worked with service dogs as a school administrator in Indiana and California.

She told the story of a young student in Indiana who was traumatized by the death of a teacher and a family member in a short span of time. He refused to return to school. When his parents finally got him to the campus, he refused to go in.

Sharon met him at the car with the school’s facility dog, Sally. The dog went to the boy and put her paw on his arm. He soon calmed down and agreed to take Sally for a walk around campus. He decided to stay.

“People have no idea how profoundly the dog will change their lives,” she says. “They were my secret teaching weapon.”

Get a dog or get involved

The CCI website is loaded with great information for people interested in getting a dog or volunteering in some capacity.

If you think you might be interested in a dog, check out this helpful page to determine if a service dog is right for you. CCI receives more applications than it has dogs available, so only the people who will benefit most will be considered.

CCI can’t do what it does without a large team of dedicated volunteers. If you would like to volunteer or help CCI in other ways, here are some ideas.

If you do get involved, I’d love to hear and share your stories of how these amazing dogs are changing lives.

Blind to Limits

On any given day, you might find Daniel Stickney surfing or scuba diving in the Pacific Ocean, participating in his college’s student government, or assisting engineers to make technology more accessible. He’s traveled the world and learned new languages. You could say the 22-year-old has a great life, that he holds the world in his hands.

The fact that he can hold anything in his hands is little short of a miracle, considering that shortly after his birth the doctors told Danny’s parents that he had cerebral palsy and would likely live his life in a fetal position.

“Daniel is a gift from God,” says his father, Dyer, a single parent who made it his mission to do whatever he could to help Danny live as independent a life as possible. Finding little help close to home, Dyer expanded that mission to other parts of the world in search of therapies that would prove the doctors wrong. Thanks to intense physical therapy at a young age, Danny is able to use his hands well enough to do many things others with his disability can’t.

Yes, I’m disabled, and…

Danny’s disabilities are merely conditions, hardly limitations. When I first sat down to talk with him and his older brother, Stanford, I asked Danny to tell me about his disabilities. He told me that he is legally blind due to cortical visual impairment, which limits his vision to a periodic sliver from the edge of his right eye.

I expected him to talk about his CP, so I prompted him for more. I got silence.

Stanford explained that Danny was raised without awareness of his disabilities. It wasn’t something he paid attention to until fairly recently. Stanford explained that their father refused to let any of the children’s limitations prevent them from participating fully in life. The focus is always on what each member of the family can do, not what they can’t. Never why, always why not.

Stanford then prompted Danny to talk about his CP, and Danny spoke briefly about his use of a wheelchair. He quickly shifted the conversation to how much he enjoys speaking with people in retirement homes to help them make their own transition to using a wheelchair. The more I tried to get him to talk about himself, the more he talked about how he loves helping others.

Danny is also a “big man on campus” at the College of Adaptive Arts in San Jose, where he takes classes and is vice president of the student government. When he’s not in school, he gives a lot of his time volunteering with various organizations. He is currently a board member for the California chapter of TASH, a disability advocacy organization, and was a featured speaker at its 2015 national conference.

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Danny navigates a sidewalk in Los Gatos, CA, during filming of “A Day with Danny” for the Google Accessibility Team.

Shaping tech access

Like any “millennial,” Danny loves technology. He and Stanford had the opportunity to hear Charles Chen of the Google Accessibility Team speak at the Vista Center Blind Expo in Palo Alto, CA, about the work the team was doing to make technology accessible to everyone. They chatted with Charles afterward and soon were meeting with the team and testing a variety of equipment and applications designed to help the visually impaired and people with limited or no fine motor skills access technology.

Danny was also featured in a Google Accessibility documentary called “A Day With Danny,” which was used internally and to promote the company’s Google Impact Challenge: Disabilities program, through which it is donating $20 million to 29 non-profits that are using technology to address a variety of accessibility challenges.

A better wheelchair

This summer I spent an afternoon at Danny’s home in Los Gatos, CA, to observe what Danny called a “Makeathon.” A group of young engineers and creative problem solvers lived with Danny and his family for a week to observe him and develop ways to help him in his daily life.

makeathon-group

Danny and his brother, Stanford (back row, left), take a break for a group photo with the “Makeathon” engineers.

By the time the group departed, Danny had a wheelchair equipped with infrared sensors that alert him to obstacles and dangers as he moves about. The engineers used existing technology to design a new type of detection system that alerts Danny when he nears stairs or other potential dangers. They will share what they learned in the open-source community in hopes that others will take their information and adapt it to solve other problems.

Two of the engineers, Stephanie Valencia and Tomas Vega, are co-founders of Assistive Labs, a “global team of dreamers and doers” working to “increase access to assistive devices for people living with disabilities in global markets by collaboratively building adapted and affordable devices” in the areas of health, education, communication, and mobility.

(I will be writing specifically about the “Makeathon” and Assistive Labs in a separate post, so stay tuned. And I hope to include video of me driving an early version of Danny’s retrofitted wheel chair. Too funny to miss!)

What’s next?

Danny views his future as limitless. He wants to continue his advocacy work for people with disabilities, particularly those who are visually impaired or who use a wheelchair. “I love to be involved in the community,” he says. “When I get a chance to help people with disabilities, I try to make life better for them.”

“I want to make it clear that even though I’m in a wheelchair I’m still a human being,” he says. “Anything I think I can do, I can do.”