Furry friends deliver for NYC kids

While some schools in Europe are using TV shows to help students better confront their emotions, New York City is turning to furry specialists. 

For over 15 years, a Fair Shake for Youth’s volunteer therapy dogs have helped nearly 4,000 middle schoolers build stronger social and emotional skills. According to founder and CEO Audrey Hendler, dogs often act as emotional “foils,” mirroring students’ emotions to help them develop compassion and resilience. 

Getting her start with a therapy dog program serving inmates, Hendler later developed Fair Shake to serve adolescents in Title 1 schools – primarily in low-income communities, where students face challenges such as deportation threats, housing and food insecurity. With two ten-week cycles that run in the fall and spring, the organization is actively looking for registered furry volunteers and humans. 

New York Nonprofit Media spoke to Audrey Hendler on how Fair Shake for Youth’s model offers students a safe space to heal through challenges with the help of registered therapy dogs. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.  

So you got your start helping inmates train therapy dogs. Why did you feel like this was a service that had potential for middle school youth? 

I did marketing for most of my career, and I was a volunteer for “Puppies behind bars,” which is a program for inmates to raise puppies that become guide dogs or service dogs. I taught at Bedford Hills, which is a maximum security women’s prison and at Fishkill, which is medium security for men. I saw the impact that the puppies had on inmates in terms of what they now call, social emotional skills. You watched as they felt more confident. They felt more self respect. They felt that people were trusting them with something. Prison is not an environment where they make you feel good about yourself. So we thought, why are we waiting until kids are grown up and in trouble? The first program we did was for an alternative to detention program for teens involved in the juvenile justice system. But we saw right away that the opportunity was so much broader. So we spent about 18 months trying different age groups and we landed on middle school. 

What are some unique challenges that adolescents are experiencing these days? 

When we started, we realized this was an area of need. There was a whole thing with deportation, and it got worse when Trump first came in 2017. Then there was COVID. Now we're back to food insecurity, homelessness and deportation. When I started, I couldn't imagine how things could be more challenging. But what we've seen since COVID, is a lot more kids are behind, not only academically, but socially. Kids wouldn't speak up. They won't speak to each other, they won't speak to adults. It's such a painful challenge. We're like, if you don't speak up, the dog won't hear you? But as the weeks go on, they become more comfortable. They start to speak up, they start to volunteer. 

How can dogs help kids gain better social, emotional skills?

So everything happens in small groups. We might do an exercise of sorting pictures about body language, and then we come back and compare notes. But a dog might decide it's going to sit outside that small circle. And the kids want to go and be with the dog, but they learn really early on – do you ever need space? Do you ever need a time out? So it becomes this foil for talking about themselves. We have a whole lesson on breed discrimination, and personally it’s not important to me whether you like pit bulls or not. It's the idea of pre-judging how people look, assuming what they're going to be like. 

As your programs are primarily centered in Title 1 schools with kids who may be going through a lot of challenges, how have therapy dogs helped your students heal from trauma? 

We're not the be-all in the end. We had one kid, he didn't really have a lot of friends, and he wore the same stuff to school every day. He was homeless. But the social worker who was our contact was elated because when he was with the dogs, he felt good. So it can change their demeanor. There was a woman who had a dog named Sam from a kill shelter and the very last class, he walked up to her, and said: “I know Sam came from a shelter, and she turned out okay. Well, I live in a shelter, do you think I'll be okay?” So that's partly why we ended up with middle school, because they're old enough to make those connections themselves. So hearing the stories of hardship and seeing how dogs overcame that, gives kids the license to feel that themselves. Attendance also improves. Kids are more focused and more open. 

Why are dogs effective at helping 13 year-olds with their emotional learning? 

I'm glad you asked, because they live in the moment. They're honest. They're non-judgmental and they're really social. They're ready to love you. People always talk about unconditional love. It's not so much that. It's more like a mirror. So if a kid is too much for a dog, the dog moves away. But they are ready, willing and able, and nothing will make them happier than to spend an hour with you. There are very few people that bring that to the party, right? 

One thing I found interesting about your program is its focus on building compassion. With this cohort of students coming out of the pandemic, do you feel like they lack empathy? 

It's not that they don't have empathy. I'm really careful to say we help kids build greater empathy. What I like to say is the dogs help the kids find their best selves. I think the dogs make it safe to let their guard down – learn about the dogs, learn about themselves, learn about each other in ways that you can't in the classroom. It’s like the great equalizer. And they're therapy dogs, so they are predisposed to be social. The dogs are genuinely happy to see the kids, which already sets the kids up for success. 

Do your volunteers come in with their own therapy dogs? So they're people's pets. And normally you think of therapy dogs as going to a hospital or a nursing home or to de-stress during the week at a college right before exams. So you can think of me as a hospital, a facility. 

So for prospective volunteers who might be eager to join your program, how should they ready themselves? 

The biggest thing is having a dog that has the right temperament. Temperament is the most important thing for a therapy dog. And most therapy dogs are born and not made. Your dog has to be able to hold it together and not jump on all the kids when they walk in the room. They have to be really social with people and good in new situations. Beyond that, they should be registered either through Pet Partners, which is the largest national organization or the Good Dog Foundation, which is the largest regional organization. So those are the two main organizations and they have slightly different certification processes.

So in your 15 years of doing this what’s been the biggest takeaway? 

It doesn't matter where we go, with kids, they want the same stuff. They want to be recognized, they want to be loved. They want to be thought well of. I don't ask what's up with any of the kids. I don't know who's flunking math. I don't know who's living in foster care. I don't know who just lost their home. A couple years ago, we were at a school where there was a shooting in the neighborhood from a kid from that school. You just have to go there with open arms. We don't ask what's up with the kids. We let the dogs figure it out.