- Paws With A Cause is a nonprofit organization that provides service dogs for people with disabilities.

They offer custom training for each client, ensuring that the service dog meets their specific needs.

Let's go meet Madge, Cooper, Dolly, Kingsley and the people that make it all happen.

- If you have extra love to give raise a puppy for a good cause.

Let's go visit Paws With A Cause.

(gentle music) Tell me about Paws With A Cause.

- Yeah, so Paws With A Cause is a nonprofit organization based right here in West Michigan, but we serve the nation and we've been around since 1979.

We're actually one of the first organizations in our country that started training and placing service dogs for people with disabilities.

We actually have placed over 3,300 service dogs in our 40 plus year history.

- How important is what you do?

- It is critical in terms of helping people live their best independent life.

We take it for granted, being able to get out of our house and hop in the car and run to the grocery store and all of those things.

And if you're a person with a disability, a dog that can be custom trained to respond to those needs means that you get to do all the best things in your life.

I love meeting a client six months later when they're like a team and then they just come in and they're standing up a little bit straighter.

That dog is right next to 'em.

It's just this really powerful experience for everybody and it's just really life changing.

- How can it be that I understand, the human that receives their service animal doesn't have to pay?

- No.

One of the things that we wanna make sure is that our dogs get in the hands of the people who need them.

And we actually invest $35,000 in a dog to get it from birth, to training, to that person.

So that's really cost prohibitive for most people, let alone somebody who maybe would be on a fixed income.

So there's a $25 application fee, but otherwise we don't charge our clients anything.

- All right, tell us about Madge.

- Madge is my ambassador dog.

She is actually really special.

She went out and actually served a client for about two years.

Unfortunately, her client passed away from cancer and the family couldn't keep her, which is so unusual, but Madge ended up coming back to PAWS 'cause we'll always take one of our dogs back.

So I said, well, how about if she becomes my ambassador dog?

And we can go out in the town and show people what our dogs can do.

So she is our official spokesperson for PAWS or Spokes dog, I guess.

- How unique is Paws With A Cause?

- We are in the top third of organizations and the number of dogs we can place every year.

So, we always talk about the need so far outpaces what we can serve.

We get over 400 qualified applications every year.

We can serve maybe 25% of those people.

So we know that the need is out there and we're just one of the few that's been doing it and we're one of the first.

(gentle music) - So what does Cooper do for you?

- He'll pick up stuff that I drop, like if my phone drops on the ground, he can pick that up.

Paper, a pencil, if I drop some coins, he can pick that up.

My wallet, if I drop that, he could pick that up.

And then the other things he does is like when I get up in the morning, he can pull me up into a sit up position so then I can stand up with my walker easier.

We have a door at home that has straps on it where he can open it and close it from the outside.

But having him, is just a joy to have.

I think a service dog for somebody that's got a disability is really a wonderful thing because it does help that person survive out in the world.

He usually lays by the door where I go out and wait for me to come back in.

He's always looking for me, he feels lost, I believe when I'm not there.

And I'm sure if he's not around, I'll feel lost.

Yeah, it's a true bond and plus it's the companionship of having such a wonderful helper.

(gentle music continues) - A staff trainer is responsible for teaching dogs custom tasks that they then match with a client that could have a various disability.

It is really important for the trainer and the dog to be one-on-one together and communicate together because every piece of the dog's training is custom fit to the client.

The breeds we use are happy to do their job.

They're all retrievers, so their job is to pick things up and bring them to people or to tug on things.

And they are very reinforced by physical praise and verbal praise, but not as much as food.

I was working with Dolly, and Dolly is being trained for a client that is nonverbal.

So what you saw was us practicing her nonverbal cues for retrieve sequence.

(gentle music continues) My job essentially is to help guide our foster puppy raisers through all the highs and lows of raising a foster puppy through PAWS.

So this is Kingsley, he's about nine months old.

He's a standard poodle.

He's in training in the foster puppy program right now.

So he does classes a couple times a month and does different outings to get different exposures to different things in day-to-day life in a variety of different environments.

So going places like grocery stores, libraries, coffee shops, that kind of thing.

It's very important for our foster puppies to be able to make sense of the world and get exposure to different things that they might encounter someday later on with their client.

We have a bunch of different options for raising as well.

You can go to our website or give us a phone call.

It's very easy to apply.

Foster puppies will be in the foster program for about a year or more and we understand that's a very big commitment for a lot of people.

So we have different possibilities for raising options.

Whether you want to start a foster puppy for the first six months, if you love the puppy stage, once they're older, then you can pass that puppy along to another raiser.

It's a long time commitment, but there are ways that you can really still get involved.

Even if you can't commit to raising a puppy for the next year.

It is life changing.

Having been a former foster raiser before starting here, my first foster puppy I ever raised went out to be an assistance dog for a client.

And being able to actually talk to her now afterwards, it blew my mind how important the work that I did with that foster puppy was for her life.

It's really amazing to be a part of that process.

(gentle music continues) (bell ringing) (upbeat theme music) - Celebrating vibrant people, captivating places, and remarkable things.

This is "Living West Michigan."

(upbeat theme music continues)