By Bailey Corley
In 2013, Lori Breece, a manager at United Disabilities Services (UDS), was working with a family. The child wanted a service dog and upfront UDS has each of their clients pay $5,000.
Somehow she had heard about Canines for Disabled Kids (CDK). Lori said, “ I reached out
to Kristin on behalf of this family and that kind of got us connected with CDK. Kristin and I went back and forth on behalf of this family. And in the end, she was able to provide a scholarship for the family to secure their service dog.” Since then, the two have been in contact with one another over the years and have become fairly good friends.

Lori helps these children because she feels that all children should be included. Every child should have the same rights and opportunities as a typical child. Just because the child may be in a wheelchair or have braces on their legs doesn’t change that. That’s where a service dog might be able to come in and help. Service dogs can make such a difference for people with disabilities. And they’re also a conversation starter because they prompt other people to ask questions about the client’s service animal.

CDK is very helpful, because it gives the families going through UDS some financial assistance. That means a lot for Lori’s clients, because service dogs cost a lot. Not to mention the training the dog and the client need to go through to become a certified service dog. Lori has also found Kristin to be very helpful to not only her clients but for her and her organization as a whole. Lori said, “ I have personally gone to Kristin Hartness many, many times over the years besides just scholarships for kids. We have
invited her to our facility. She has helped work with my trainers. She has been a mentor and she has helped guide us through some situations that we have had with diagnoses in clients.”

Lori just recently started promoting CDK. When her clients would come in for group training, she would always tell them about CDK. But it was either on a piece of paper or in an email. At the end of last year, Lori mentioned to Kristin that she would like to help promote CDK more. Kristin had mentioned that she created some fliers. So Kristin sentsome of them for Lori to use and hand out to her clients.

Lori wants to do more for CDK. “Maybe even link them on our website and talk about them on our Facebook group so that we can help more people find them. Because, like I said, there is so much more than their name. So their name could be deceiving, because they do so much more. That’s something that they might need to consider going down the road.” Lori has connected with CDK via email and a lot of phone calls with Kristin. It’s a good experience and she is able to refer families not only for scholarships but for clients with PTSD and other conditions. Lori has found that Kristin has a wealth of information and resources. For Lori, she partnered with Kristin because, “You always want to partner with people that know things. You always want to connect yourselves with people that have other resources that you may not have. And Kristin was that person. You know, when she came out, she didn’t have to travel all that way. She could have, you know, scheduled a Zoom meeting. She could have scheduled phone conference calls. But instead she traveled here to Lancaster to spend the entire day with my trainers, to help teach them about a diagnosis that we were not familiar with.”

Kristin also taught them or worked with them on different training techniques for dogs that needed them. There would be clients who were going to need balance and stability and counterbalance. This was an area where Lori’s trainers were not 100 percent familiar. “So Kristin’s expertise and knowledge just based on her day-to-day interactions being a person with a disability was just invaluable to us.”