With July just around the corner, May and June have both been quite busy!!! Thank you for all you and your fur babies do for our communities!! We hear heartfelt thanks, on every visit we make, from clients, residents and staff, on just how greatly we are appreciated!!!!

      Our group is in high demand and we truly are unable to keep up with all of the requests that we receive, therefore; recruiting remains to be a priorty. We recently had a request to work with a group of autistic children at Turtle Park. Thank you to Beverly Nichols with Mandy, Prudence Milner with Buzz and myself with Maxine for attending this event.  

     Phoebe also had a special request recently. A patient that we had visited in the past asked the staff if she could receive a visit from Paws Patrol. Thank you to Karen Martin and Baxter who went up to visit with her that day! The patient really enjoyed visiting with Karen and Baxter and the staff truly appreciated their visting with her. Thank you, Karen and Baxter!!!!  

     Phoebe's behavioral health has been asking us to visit for sometime now and we have added it to our calendar. We added this visit on the second Friday of each month after our 10:00-10:45 ACTO visit. We will be visiting Phoebe Behavioral Health from 11:00-12:00.  

     On Monday we received a wonderful donation from Phoebe in the amount of $1,000.00. YAY!!!! This money is to help us supply our teams with bookmarks to leave with patients and clients that we visit with. Phoebe facilities are a huge portion of our mission and we have been dedicated to them for many years now. We will be providing these bookmarks to our more active teams. Vida Gross will be gathering the necessary information from our members and she will work with Gillespie Printers to print them for us. Suzanne Perrine in Volunteer Services made this happen for us and the proceeds from the gift shop is actually where the money came from!!! Thank you Phoebe and Suzanne is awesome!! Let's remember to support the Gift Shop at Phoebe! 

                                                  Cheryl, Maxine, Schatzi & Betty                                                                  

                      *****Paws Patrol accepted a $1,000.00 donation from Phoebe********

                                                           THANK YOU PHOEBE!!!!! 

         We held evaluations on June 9th and I am excited to say that we now have two new teams! Donna Cannon with Annie and Faith Holcombe with Lulu-Jane, they both received a Complex rating. We welcome you to our mission and look forward to volunteering with you!!! Our next workshop wil be held on Sunday afternoon, July 14th. Please spread the word if you know of someone that would make a good team. 

              Donna Cannon and Annie                                           Faith Holcombe and Lulu

     Our next evaluations will be held on Sunday afternoon August 18th. If you know of anyone that might be interested please let them know. Also, current teams need to check their expiration date on their badges and if you expire in September 2019, please signup for your renewal evaluation. 

     We are partnering with the Albany Humane Society with our Humane Education presentations and on June 7th we were invited to Merry Acres Middle School Day Camp Program. We spoke with nearly 200 children about our volunteer mission and introduced some of our therapy dogs to them. We also launched our new Humane Education Program and it was awesome!! A huge thank you to our friend, Vida Gross, who put our Power Points together for both topics. Vida also presented the Humane Education portion and it was fantastic!  I want to also thank our wonderful teams that participated in this special event. Karen Martin with Baxter, Rachel Dorough with Elvis, myself with Maxine & Smoky and Wayne Carter (AHS Board Member) with Beverly Nichol's little rescue dog Yuki. Yuki was rescued from the Albany Humane Society by Beverly Nichols and is going to make a great therapy dog. 

      We have some great dogs and cats that come through the Humane Society that would make great therapy dogs. I try to keep my eye on these dogs and would love to place them with people that might be interested in joining our mission but may not have an appropriate dog or cat.

      As most you know, I have been spending some time helping at the Albany Humane Society and Vida has been helping out as well. Along with the employees, volunteers and other board members we are trying desperately to save as many animals as possible. If any of you are interested in volunteering we could use the help? You can help by just coming and spending time and sharing some TLC with some of these animals or, take a dog on a doggy date, for a few hours, or an entire day. It is good for them to have more human contact and to get a break from the shelter, exposure and introducing them to the public is a huge benefit. We are planning to take some dogs on Saturday mornings, to the Tift Market between 9:00 and 11:00 am. We will be selling dog/cat treats and human cookies. If you would like to volunteer to help with these Adopt a Dog events, please contact me for more information.       

      Karen Martin has volunteered to be our social planner. She will be setting a date and time for our next social event! Karen and Don have been very gracious and welcomed us and our fur babies into their home and yard for these gatherings. We will send out an email when we set the date but, it will be on a Sunday and will begin around 5:00 pm so we will miss the worst heat of the day. Please plan on attending so that our humans and our dogs/cats can get better aquainted and just have a relaxing couple of hours together sharing. 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO OUR MAY AND JUNE BIRTHDAYS!!!!

PAULA PATTERSON, FAITH HOLCOMBE AND CHERYL COHEN