[nagdu] Why should donors give to guide dog schools?

[Nicole Torcolini]

I don't think that Peter Singer knows what he is talking about. Yes, a guide
dog costs a lot, but medical research costs more. Even if you took eleven
people and trained enough guide dogs to guarantee that everyone received one
with a 45% failure rate--twenty dogs--it would probably still cost more to
cure them of blindness. Also, blindness comes in so many forms and can be
caused by so many things that, like someone else said, unless there is a
"magic wand", it is going to be a very, very long time before they figure
out how to cure all forms of blindness. If this argument was being made for
something like AIDS or cancer where there is more of a common denominator
and any research in any part of the condition helps all of it, I would say
that it might hold, but not for blindness.

-----Original Message-----
From: nagdu [mailto:nagdu-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Ginger Kutsch
Sent: Friday, November 08, 2013 9:09 AM
To: 'NAGDU Mailing List,the National Association of Guide Dog Users'
Subject: [nagdu] Why should donors give to guide dog schools?

Ed, thanks for sharing this article. It may be of interest to know that this
article was published in response to comments made by Peter Singer, a
well-known Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, who frequently
lectures about effective altruism. He recommends that donors put data ahead
of passion and give to organizations that help the most people. He stated
"You could provide one guide dog for one blind American, or you could cure
between 400 and 2,000 people of blindness. I think its clear what is the
better thing to do." 

And really, if you stop to think about it, tax payers already pay for blind
people to learn how to travel independently with a white cane. So in this
case, it shouldn't be surprising that some might question why thousands of
dollars more should be spent to provide a guide dog to a blind
person...especially when some blind people assert that they travel just as
well with a white cane as they do with a guide dog.

I would be interested to hear from list members as to why they think donors
should give to guide dog schools. I could easily make an argument for list
members like Mike M. who sacrificed so much for our country -- no amount of
money makes up for what he lost in service to each and every one of us. But
for those of us who aren't wounded warriors, why should donors give money to
help us? Said differently, if you were a fundraiser for a guide dog school,
what would you say to convince a donor  to give to your school?

Best,

Ginger
 
-----Original Message-----
From: nagdu [mailto:nagdu-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Ed Meskys
Sent: Friday, November 08, 2013 10:32 AM
To: nagdu
Subject: [nagdu] dog guides

Precious Eyes.
NY Times Friday, 2013_11_08
By PAUL SULLIVAN. Paul Sullivan donates to charities for the blind,
including guide dog schools.. JENNIFER MURRAY woke after a night out with
friends and thought her husband was playing a trick on her. She could not
see anything and did not believe him when he said it was daytime.
'It was like a light switch had been shut off,' she said. 'I shut my eyes,
and I blinked. And I tried it again several times. Then I realized the sun
was in my face, and I said, now what?
Ms. Murray had been battling to keep what little vision she had since her
premature birth in 1978. She had a bit of peripheral vision in one eye but
nothing else. A few years before the day when she lost her eyesight for
good, she had an operation to implant a permanent contact lens in her right
eye. It gave her sight such as she had never had before.
'I was giddy for weeks,' she said. 'I could see everything, and everybody
was beautiful.
I remember thinking life is so colorful and so pretty, and I wouldn't have
taken that back for the world.
With her vision gone again, Ms. Murray said she began to withdraw from the
world.
Her husband, an Iraqi war veteran, was going through a difficult time, and
life was a struggle. With the birth of their son, Liam, who is now 2, Ms.
Murray said she realized she needed to become more independent to care for
him.
'I realized the white cane wasn't cutting it,' she said. 'I was putting a
lot of unspoken pressure on my husband and my son, which isn't fair to them.
That was when she decided to try to get a guide dog.
The mission of all guide dog schools is to create a team, pairing a blind
person and a dog to give the person greater freedom and independence. It
would seem to be an easy cause for fund-raising.
After all, most people melt when they see a puppy -- a big marketing tool
for these schools -- and helping blind people lead better lives seems to be
an unqualified good.
Yet if the cause is an easy sell, the work is not cheap. These schools need
to raise money and engage volunteers on a very large scale to ensure they
have enough resources to pay for the long, costly and often unsuccessful
training of dogs. One guide dog takes about two years to train and costs a
total of $45,000 to $60,000, covering everything from boarding a dog to
extensive drilling by professional trainers in serving the needs of the
blind to a weekslong period acclimating dog to recipient.
And about 45 percent of dogs bred by the schools do not make the grade. 
Those
that
do are provided free to people who need them.
Beyond this, guide dog charities must compete in the wider contest for
dollars among nonprofit organizations. The Urban Institute, a research
organization that focuses on social and economic issues, estimates that 1.6
million such groups operate in America today, a 25 percent increase in the
last decade.
'We're in competition with every charity and cause that's out there,' said
Eliot Russman, chief executive and executive director of Fidelco Guide Dog
Foundation, in Bloomfield, Conn. 'American Cancer Society, American Heart
Society -- everyone is out there telling compelling stories. There is a
finite pool of money.
'We've got puppies, but Hole in the Wall Gang has dying children,' he said.
'What's
more compelling? Our donors have to have confidence in management.
Mr. Russman came to Fidelco from the advertising world, where his clients
included McDonald's and Xerox. And that experience has helped him sell
potential donors on Fidelco, known for its German shepherds.
Bob Forrester, president and chief executive of the Newman's Own Foundation,
which receives its money from the line of foods created by Paul Newman in
1982, and gives money to the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, said the school fit
with the foundation's mission of empowerment. 'We want to help people to
rise to whatever their potential might be if that potential is being
thwarted by circumstances beyond their control,'
Mr. Forrester said.
He said that the foundation had given Fidelco $450,000 since 2010 for a
program that pairs guide dogs with blinded combat veterans. 'We think
broadly that it will be for nine dogs, but specifically we trust and respect
our nonprofits to use it well and let us know,' Mr. Forrester said.
One of the dogs the foundation's money paid to train is Xxon, a male German
shepherd, who was paired with Michael Malarsie, an Air Force sergeant, a
year to the day after he was nearly killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan
in January 2010. He survived a severe injury that left him blind, though
four others in his unit were killed.
In an interview last month before running a half-marathon in Hartford, Mr.
Malarsie,
25, said that when he was recovering at Walter Reed National Military
Medical Center he decided he wanted a guide dog. 'I made a promise to myself
that I wasn't going to let blindness slow me down,' he said.
He has three children and said Xxon, with a sweet, gentle face not often
associated with the breed, serves a more basic function: He helps him find
his children when they hide from him.
Mr. Malarsie's wife, Julie, whose first husband died in the same blast --
and who met Mr. Malarsie when she and other widows of those killed visited
survivors -- said Xxon had been just as important for the family as for Mr.
Malarsie. 'He's not relying on me,' she said. 'I know he's safe and taken
care of. I know he's not going to wander off. Xxon helped him find that
independence and confidence.
Like many nonprofits, guide dog schools find big corporate donations hard to
attract.
The Guide Dog Foundation for the Blind in Smithtown, N.Y., receives
contributions from local businesses. One is Marchon, an eyewear company
based on Long Island.
Donna Rollins, vice president of United States sales operations at Marchon,
said the company became involved with the foundation when the economy
faltered in 2008.
Marchon was having a party for 5,000 people at a trade show in Las Vegas and
decided that, given the times, it should have a charitable component, she
said. 'We had a band made up of eye doctors that was going to play, and we
asked our partners to sponsor the band to benefit the Guide Dog Foundation,'
she said. That raised $25,000.
Instead of having an open bar, the company paid for the first two drinks and
charged
$5 for additional ones, which raised another $5,000.
While the company has continued to promote the foundation at its trade show,
the amounts today are lower.
Jean Thomas, director of donor and public relations at The Seeing Eye Inc. 
in
Morristown,
N.J., which says it is the oldest guide dog school in the world (founded in
1929), said the school had had success in setting up lunches at companies to
discuss what it does -- dogs in tow -- with employees. Still, she said,
three-quarters of Seeing Eye's support comes from bequests and estate gifts,
two areas that could be in trouble for all nonprofit groups as younger
donors seek to give while they are alive.
The
Seeing Eye and Guide Dogs for the Blind in San Rafael, Calif., each have
endowments of more than $200 million, but they are exceptions among the
dozen guide dog schools in the United States. Most rely on individual donors
to finance day-to-day operations.
One way to raise money is to allow people to sponsor a dog, which entitles
them to name it. At the Guide Dog Foundation for the Blind, this costs
$6,000 per puppy.
'We have a lot of ways for donors to come to us,' said Katherine Fritz,
director of development at the Guide Dog Foundation, citing events like bike
races, walks and runs that typically net about $25,000. A recent golf
tournament brought in $185,000.
'A majority of our donations come through direct mail and are from smaller
donors,'
she said. 'But we had one woman who gave $25 a year for 25 years and made a
six-figure donation in her estate, and she didn't inform us about it.
One thing all of these schools share is the need for hundreds of volunteers
a year to answer phones, give tours or just walk dogs. They also need people
to help socialize the dogs in their first year. Called puppy walkers or
puppy raisers, these volunteers take the puppy home at eight weeks, teach it
the basics like obedience and return it when it is about 14 months old.
Roger, 70, and Sheila Woodhour, 68, of Woodcliff Lake, N.J., are on their
29th German shepherd. Fourteen of the puppies they have taken for The Seeing
Eye have become guide dogs. Yet Mrs. Woodhour still gets choked up over
their first one, Dorsey.
'When I gave up Dorsey I thought no one was going to love her as much as I
did,'
she said. But when she later saw Dorsey working, she changed her mind. 'I
loved the dog, but I didn't need the dog,' she said. 'I realized it gives
them purpose.
She and other puppy walkers said the line they hear over and over from
people is some version of, 'I could never do that because I couldn't give
the dog back.
Gail Horan, who raised Xxon as a puppy at her home in Farmington, Conn.,
said she and her husband cried all the way to Fidelco the day he was due
back. She admitted that in the back of her mind she wondered if he might
fail and come back to her.
'That does go through your mind,' she said. 'But you have to remember that's
not why you did it. I wish there were words that could tell you how it made
me feel when he passed' the training. These schools also need volunteers to
talk about what they do, with the goal of bringing in more volunteers and
donations.
Celebrities are part of this. Isabella Rossellini, the Italian actress and
model, and Betty White, the comedian and sitcom star, both volunteer to help
schools for guide dogs.
Ms. White said she sponsors a dog each year at Guide Dogs for the Blind, and
offers to have lunch or dinner with the highest bidder in an auction each
year for The Seeing Eye.
'It's a chance for me to say thank you for your support,' she said. 'It
means we're all animal lovers, so we have no problem with conversation.
Those dinners have fetched $5,500 to $20,000 each over the last five years. 
Ms.
Rossellini
has helped socialize 10 puppies for the Guide Dog Foundation. Seven have
become working guide dogs.
She has also helped four dogs as they gave birth in her Long Island home. A
fund-raiser there last summer after a litter was born raised $6,000. 'I
decided everything I do, whether I give money or I volunteer, I have to be
hands on,' she said. 
'I
see
the rate of success. I see they're useful.
She added that, initially, 'I was interested in dogs, but it also makes me
feel good that those dogs go to help people who are visually impaired.
Criticism of guide dog charities often is based of the cost of training a
dog and pairing it with a person. The failure rate for these animals is
high. Dogs mainly wash out for health reasons -- bad eyesight, hip or
stomach problems -- and for temperament, such as being too calm or too
high-strung. And they can work for only eight to 10 years before they retire
to become pets. A blind person could need six or seven dogs in a lifetime,
which is a considerable expense.
'We have something people can see and understand, but it is certainly still
a challenging fund-raising environment,' Ms. Thomas of The Seeing Eye said.
'One of the challenges is, what we do has a profound impact on about 265
people a year. If you're going up against a charity that feeds one million
people a year, that's a tough comparison.
Philanthropic advisers point out, though, that while there are ways to
affect more lives with the same dollars, donors might not get the same level
of satisfaction out of doing it. 'If where you're giving to doesn't reflect
things that you're interested and passionate about, it won't be very
rewarding for you,' said Jim Coutre, partner at The Philanthropic Initiative
in Boston. 'Donors have to be honest with themselves.
If providing clean water to a village in Africa doesn't resonate with them
emotionally, they're not going to throw themselves into it.
He added, though, that people should still be discerning among different
nonprofit organizations focusing on the same cause. 'There are lots of
different organizations that train these dogs, but they're not all equal,'
he said. 'Some are going to have more impact.
The guide dog schools are addressing the high failure rate by improving
breeding and training to reduce the number of animals that do not succeed
and by finding other uses for them.
Mr. Russman said Fidelco dogs that do not make the cut sometimes work for
the police departments in Connecticut and New York. A Fidelco-trained dog
found a survivor at the World Trade Center site the day after the attack in
2001. A few years ago, Wells B. Jones, chief executive of the Guide Dog
Foundation, said that the group saw a need for service dogs to help soldiers
with traumatic injuries. Called America's Vet Dogs, the program has since
expanded to help civilians who have served the country.
He said the former representative Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the
head while meeting with constituents outside a Tucson supermarket in 2011,
uses a dog trained through the program to help with balance.
'We had dogs that weren't being used in the guide dog program that could
contribute,'
he said. 'We viewed that as an opportunity to meet a need using existing
resources.
Frankly it's turned out to have lots of benefits for us. And it's added to
what we were doing with veterans.
Ed Bordley, a lawyer at the Justice Department in Washington who has been
blind since age 10, said that after one winter navigating Harvard University
as a freshman, he applied for a guide dog in 1976.
'You had these snow banks and people parking their cars on the sidewalks so
there was just a little room to get around,' he said. 'The dog would find
the path in the snow banks and walk you around the cars.
After graduating from Harvard Law School and embarking on a career that
required him to travel, he appreciated the dog more. 'I feel that there is a
dignity to having a dog,' said Mr. Bordley, who is on his fifth dog. 'When
you're using a cane, people grab you and direct you all the time.
The dogs also do things a cane or any GPS device could not do. Cliff Aaron,
a lawyer who works in Lower Manhattan and lost his sight late in life from a
hereditary condition, said his first dog, Alto, kept him from getting hurt
the first day they went to work.
'I have to cross Church Street and Broadway every day,' he said. 'I'd been
relying on my hearing or someone to help me. On my first day with him he
stopped. I couldn't figure it out. Then I felt this wind go right past my
face. I knew right away it was a bike messenger who blew the light.
Last month, after four weeks at The Seeing Eye, Ms. Murray was getting ready
to go home with her dog, Fuchsia. 'They've changed my life in ways they only
think they know, but they don't know,' she said, with Fuchsia curled up by
her chair.
Yet she admitted to some trepidation in leaving the school and returning
home to what will be a very different life with her dog. She did not know
how her life would be changed.
'When I lost my sight, I kind of just sheltered in a bit,' she said. 'The
first time I walked down the street with Fuchsia and I felt the wind on my
face, I was smiling like a little kid.
Tears of joy ran down from her closed eyes.. PHOTOS: LEARNING THE ROPES: 
Igloo
is
being trained at the Fidelco Guide Dog Foundation in Bloomfield, Conn., to
give a blind person more independence. (F1); ONE ON ONE: A puppy gets
personal attention at Fidelco.; NEW BEST FRIEND: Sue McCahill of The Seeing
Eye helped Jennifer Murray adjust to a guide dog. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDREW
SULLIVAN FOR THE NEW YORK
TIMES)
(F2).
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