ElectricAid has supported Irish Guide Dogs for the Blind since 2004. Established in 1976, IGDB is a registered and trusted charity, which provides life changing services and supports to people who are vision impaired and to families of children with autism. Their services for people who are vision impaired are: Guide Dog Training, Orientation and Mobility Training (Long Cane) and Independent Living Skills Training for adults, Next Steps programme for people entering third level education for the first time, and a Child Mobility Training Programme for children in primary and secondary education. They also provide Assistance Dogs to families of children with autism. All of their services are free of charge with full aftercare provided..
Launched in 2005, their Assistance Dog (AD) Programme was the first of its kind in Europe. Since then they have helped hundreds of families of children with autism. Their “superhero dogs” help to control and improve the behaviour of a child with autism by promoting calmness and acting as a safety aid to the parents. With the help of the dogs family outings can become less stressful, allowing families to enjoy greater freedom and mobility. Due to the success of the AD programme, there are now extensive waiting lists for the service. In 2016 Electric Aid supported the development of the Assistance Dog programme to help mitigate the need for excessive waiting times for families of children with Autism, allowing IGDB to structure the programme in a way that allowed for more clients to be placed on the system. The restructuring of the programme also allowed them to fill capacity of working dogs within a significantly reduced period thus maximising the number of partnerships achieved.
In 2017 the funding from Electric Aid allowed IGDB establish a TCI (trans-cervical insemination) program. Having an adequate supply of healthy, temperamentally sound and trainable dogs available is critically important to the Guide and Assistance Dog programmes. With ElectricAid’s support IGDB have been able to carry out several TCI transactions throughout the year, increasing puppy litter frequency and size – and thereby training more Guide & Assistant Dogs.
“Irish Guide Dogs would like to extend a massive thank you to Electric Aid as through theses projects we can continue to deliver our free services along with full aftercare, which greatly improve people’s quality of life and give them the independence and confidence to participate more fully in work, education or whatever they choose.”
For more info see https://guidedogs.ie/.
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