Meet Sarah and Darryl, from Derbyshire
Posted 3 years ago in the Volunteers and fundraisers category
Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic our community of volunteers stepped up and helped us to continue training our amazing dogs.
Sarah and Darryl have been volunteer Fosterers at our Midlands Training Centre since 2015. This is their story:
We met a lady in our village and were full of compliments for her beautiful Labrador. She explained that it wasn’t her dog and that she was a volunteer Fosterer for Canine Partners. About five minutes after we got home, we had been on the website and registered! We both work full time and having a dog of our own just isn’t ideal, but the opportunity to foster sounded really appealing – and we were right!
We get quite emotional when we think about the benefits the dogs bring to their respective partners -assisting with a disability and all the clever tasks the dogs do is one thing but the emotional support the dogs can give is something quite unique. What started as an opportunity for us to have some time with a dog quickly turned into focusing on what the dogs do to others. We love hearing how the dogs we fostered are getting on with their partners, we have been incredibly lucky to have a couple of them reach out to us once the dogs have settled in.
We feel absolutely blessed to be given the opportunity to support Canine Partners by having our current foster dog, Smartie, during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown Having her 24/7 has been a dream. She has been the perfect girl and is so patient when we’ve been working from home. Neither of us were furloughed and it’s been a very busy time, but we made sure that she’s been stimulated during the day and kept up with the weekly tasks and activities set up by the Canine Partners training team, who kept in touch with us throughout. She’s such a willing learner.