Our Care Team works tirelessly to make sure our dogs are healthy and happy, and we'd love your help to keep our kennels pristine! With our built-in pressure washing system, it's a straight-forward process from start to finish, but it makes a huge difference for our Team and our wonderful dogs. With your caring hand, we can make sure our dog's care is maintained at a high level, as well as giving our Team time to do additional critical projects!
Indoor/Outdoor
Join our Canine Care Team in providing top quality care for our resident dogs. By volunteering with the Canine Care Team, you will help the Team nurture a healthy, mindful kennel! Help our Team feed, water, or enliven a dog’s day by giving them a toy. Help maintain safe and clean spaces by helping to clean the yards, and provide clean inside living and play spaces for our four-legged friends. This volunteer opportunity will also allow you the space to play with some of our beautiful dogs!
Primarily Outdoor/Possible Indoor
Everyone needs the chance to relax and have some fun… especially our dogs! If you love to play with dogs, our dogs would love to play with you. Help give them the chance to unwind and enjoy some well-earned time off by facilitating play and games with them. Perhaps you’d like to engage their minds with thinking puzzles or seeking missions. Maybe you’d like to give them a chance to run off their energy by throwing the ball or playing soccer! These are some of the many possibilities for joyful adventures with our dogs.
Primarily Outdoor/Possible Indoor
Our kennels are full of young, intelligent dogs who are eager to play, learn, and work. Help us keep idle paws from getting into mischief by guiding them through exercises to build their strength, coordination, and awareness. Through these physical activities, you can help engage the minds of our dogs while building trust and personal relationships with them. If you’ve seen the agility trials at dog shows, you’ll have the right idea about what this opportunity is! Help our dogs learn to overcome challenges such as navigating weave poles, traveling across and through obstacles, performing movement patterns, and more!
Both Outdoor and Indoor
Dogs live and work with people, and all of us prefer having a well behaved canine partner that. Help the Team take our dogs through exercises that give them an understanding of how to be good partner. Help them become familiar with every day situations and learn appropriate ways to handle them. As you spend time with the dogs, you will build their trust, confidence, and consistency, and then support them in a variety of new circumstances so they have the keys to figure out solutions to new problems they encounter. Present the dogs with a diversity of everyday puzzles, such as doors, curbs, cars, and new sights and sounds in a plethora of locations on and off campus, with a goal of helping them become independent problem solvers and cooperative, understanding members of a team! This training involves line and leash work.
Outdoor/Indoor
Some of our dogs need a bit of a break from their daily play and exercise routine, but we still love for them to have fresh air and a chance to stretch their legs. These dogs need gentler exercise, but still want a chance to play! Help us give a little extra love to dogs recovering from medical operations, give our girls in heat a safe space to play, and snuggle some dogs in need of some TLC. These dogs will primarily walk with you on a line or free play in a small yard with your supervision, and then join you for quieter snuggles in a small room equipped for cuddling.
Indoor during the winter, Indoor/Outdoor in the pleasant months
If you’re looking for a little personal time to slow down and enjoy some peaceful moments free of demands, our dogs would love to join you for some one-on-one quiet time. Our dogs lead busy lives learning, playing, and working, and they would love a chance to unwind. This is a perfect opportunity for you to catch up on some reading, finish homework, crochet, or pursue a different quiet hobby with a canine companion to help you relax. Enjoy the dog’s quirky personalities as they play with toys, chew bones, snuggle up to you and shake off the stresses of the daily grind.
Indoors
Join our Team in building trust with our dogs by taking our furry friends through touch and massage exercises! These easy to perform techniques will help our dogs build confidence through pleasurable human contact. Guide the dogs through touch based exercises to help acclimate them to human contact, culminating in gentle massage work to help them relax, build trust, and adjust to their training program! Help our dogs learn how to appropriately react to stressful situations of all kinds, and give them better focus and assurance when being handled. Learn new massage techniques and help our beautiful dogs relax deeply and enjoy life while they stay with us!
Indoor/Possibly outdoor
Having a group of busy, smart dogs is wonderful… until they get bored! Idle paws love to invent their own games around here, and sometimes they get into mischief! Help our Team keep our dogs engaged by cleaning, creating, and even sometimes distributing enrichment toys and activities for our dogs in training. Prepare Kongs for dogs by stuffing them full of goodies such as peanut butter and other treats, create hunting games by preparing hide, sniff, and seek boards, make batches of edible bubbles, and more. Creative kids are welcome too!
Indoors
Our dogs love playing outside and rolling in the mud! They keep our grooming and Care Teams very busy maintaining order. This opportunity allows you to help our staff and relax our dogs by giving the dogs a spa day! We have grooming areas available for bathing and drying our dog friends, and we’ll equip you with brushes, combs, and gentle massage curries so you can maintain their coats and brush their stress away. Our dogs will enjoy some one-on-one time in a day designed to spoil them and make them feel like the treasures they really are.
Indoor/Outdoor
Our dogs are really cute, and we like to show them off! We’d love for you to enjoy our dogs and let others see how wonderful they are too. Take pictures of our dogs with our training and enrichment teams working on new skills or frolicking together, or enjoy private time with just you and the dogs, taking pictures of them playing with their friends, chasing a ball, or just plain being adorable. Not a professional photographer, but still love taking photos or want to improve your shots? No problem! Come practice your skills and enjoy the company of our four legged friends at the same time! We would love to feature your wonderful photos of our amazing dogs here at PAWS CEC.
Our dedicated PAWS groupies (and our new fans!) love to decorate themselves, their families, their friends, their houses, and their dogs with adorable PAWS merch... so thank goodness we recently expanded our merchandise line and created a new PAWS store! Located at our headquarters in Wayland, you will find a fun, curated collection of T-shirts, jackets mugs, blankets, cool dog collars, games, treats, jewelry, home décor – and more! Proceeds from the store support the PAWS mission, and you can help by assisting shoppers to find the perfect item for themselves or a gift for someone they love.
We may have a pop-up store at an off-campus event, too!
General list of tasks the volunteer will be performing:
This opportunity takes place primarily indoors; special events may be indoors or outdoors.
This opportunity is for one person at a time, unless otherwise specified by the volunteer supervisor.
The store is not very interesting to your children, however we have plenty of other family friendly opportunities you can sign up for!
Paws With A Cause® enhances the independence and quality of life for people with disabilities nationally through custom-trained Assistance Dogs.
PAWS increases the awareness of the rights and roles of Assistance Dog Teams through education and advocacy.
