New Facility!

We finally have a permanent location for our organization.  Until now we’ve been working out of homes and rented and loaned training facilities.  Thanks to one of our generous board members who has bought the house and will be donating use of it to Disability Assistance Dogs, we will now have a permanent location including an office, training area, and housing for up to four dogs in training.

The new facility is located at 6145 Fair Ave in Davenport.  This is a residential home in the Goose Creek area north of 53rd Street,  west of Brady Street, and south of I-80, providing easy access to everyone in the Quad-Cities and surrounding area.

We will have access to the house by the end April.  After that the real work begins!

First, we need to fence the backyard and put in kennels for the dogs in training.  The yard will also serve as our main training area during the summer.  In the winter we’ll use the garage.  All year round our trainer will also train in the house where she’ll also live in order to provide care for the dogs. We’ll put some shelving and storage in the garage for equipment.  There’s a shed in the backyard where we can store maintenance equipment, but it will eventually need to be replaced and set up to store some of our outdoor training equipment as well.  As you can imagine, we’ll need funds to do this.  We are seeking grant funds, but we also need your support!  You can help with this project by donating here.

With the outdoors taken care of, we’ll also need to set up the office.  There is a small 9′x11′ room next to the garage that we will use as an office.  We are currently developing a plan to remodel this room and add onto it by expanding into the garge either as a larger one room office, or a separate meeting room.  We will put a door in from the garage or from the outside of the house to allow access to the office space.   This office space will allow us to meet with people, hold our board and other meetings, and volunteers can help us with essential office work.  We will apply for grants for this project as well, but also need your support! 

With this new facility, we will be able to train and place more Professionally Trained Assistance and Service Dogs.  Our dogs will have a place to live while they are in training and we will have the equipment and facilities we need to provide them with the quality training needed to allow them to do their future jobs. In addition, we’ll be have a place to better serve those training their own dogs through the Supervised Training Program.  We will also have a place to work better with our puppy raisers and volunteers who do some of the most important work of preparing the puppies for their future roles!

Future plans may include adding on a larger indoor training area where we can also provide indoor kennels for the dogs, replacing the shed and other projects.

We are planning to have an Open House this fall.  Watch the calendar, but it’s tenatively planned for August 14th.  By then we hope to have a good part of the work done!

Check out these pictures of the new facility and imagine what it will be like as we develop it!

Please help support our new facility.  Donate here!

All funds donated will go directly to the remodeling and maintenance of our facility.