 Welcome to another episode of the non-profit show. It's a Monday morning and I'm really honored that our guest could be with us because she just had one of her big fundraiser events this weekend, first big live action-packed post-pandemic event. So wow, Carol, you're really brave. Well, we need to get back out there in person again. Yeah, yeah, oh my gosh. Well, we're really excited that you're gonna join us today and talk about your program, Early Alert Canines. It's gonna be a really interesting conversation, but before we dig into this and really start picking your brain about what you and your organization do, let's remind everybody, if you don't know who we are, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Non-profit Academy. I am not being joined by the non-profit nerd herself, Jared Ransom. Jared conducted, actually we both conducted board trainings this weekend in different parts of the country and I think Jared lost her voice. So she texted me early this morning. She'll be back on air tomorrow with us. We want to thank all of our presenting sponsors. Most of you have been with us since we started this crazy idea almost three years ago, Blumerang, American Non-profit Academy, your part-time controller, Bee Generous, Fundraising Academy at National University, Staffing Boutique, Non-profit Thought Leader and the Non-profit Nerd. These are the folks that are with us day in and day out. If you've missed any of our more than 600, actually close to 650 episodes, you can find our full and robust library archive on Roku, YouTube, Amazon Fire TV and Vimeo. And now we are on podcast format. So the, I would say practically like the last year, all of these current episodes are also being formatted into podcasts. So queue us up wherever you like to get your content. Okay, Carol, deep breath. I got through all my homework housekeeping. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Tell us where early alert canines is based. We are in Concord, California, which is the northern part of the state, about halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento. Wow, okay. And your organization, even though they're based in Northern California, I assume you're doing work all over the country. We do. Our geographical area is the four western states, so Washington, Oregon, California and Nevada. However, as life would have it, people get placed with dogs and they move out of that service area. So we also have people in eight other states as well that we support. And yeah, I never thought about that. Of course, that's an interesting message given that we do have this movement within the country now that people can kind of work from anywhere in a lot of cases. I would imagine families are moving and yeah, super interesting. Yes, people shift around as life sends them their different ways. Sure, sure. Well, we're delighted that you're here and we really have a lot of questions, but first and foremost, what is an early alert canine? And if you can walk us through, because it seems like from looking at your website, this is also more of used with a specific breed of animal. Is that correct? It's, well, let's start with the definition. Yeah, yeah. We'll get into what you use. How's that? So early alert canine is a dog that's been specifically trained to alert on blood sugar when it goes out of range. So through their wonderful sense of smell, they can tell that the chemical changes that are going on in the body and they can let their partner know before they even become symptomatic that they're about to have a blood sugar issue. So that way the human can decide what they need to do. Do they need to take a little bit of insulin or just some food to counteract whatever's about to happen with their blood sugar? In the diabetes world, that keeps the extreme highs and the extreme lows from happening. So it gives the diabetic an overall better life with less chance of complications from long-term high blood sugar or the acute issues that can happen from a very quick dropping low blood sugar. Amazing. Now, how long has this? I don't want to use the word technology, but I kind of want to use the word technology. How long has this been in practice? I've been training diabetic alert dogs since about 2003. So it's been around for a number of years. Again, what we did was the smell has always existed and the dogs can smell it. We put a purpose to that and taught them how to alert on that. And that is how we teach the dogs to work. And you were indicating before that it looks like we use a certain breed of dogs. We get all of our dogs from either canine companions or guide dogs for the blind. So they do a lot of breeding. They breed twice as many dogs as they need. And when those get career changed, we're offered those dogs as part of our program. So because they breed labs and goldens and the mix of the two, they call that a cross. That's what we end up with in our program. Now, technically any dog can do it. They have the nose, we can teach them the set work. Now, some of them don't have the work ethic that needs to go along with it. I've tried poodles who tend to be a little bit more aloof. And when I ask them to show me where it is, they'll show me once and then I'll ask them to show me again. And they look at me like, I just did that, move on. But the labs, labs love their humans and they want to help them. So that actually makes them excellent for this type of work. Wow. How long does it take you to train a service animal? It's very much, it's kind of like training a human. Everybody has a different style of learning and retaining it and a work ethic. So one dog might do it in a few weeks. It might take another dog a few months. After we do the initial training and get them working on the set, then we move over to working on the person so that the dog is alerting in real time and real life. Once we make that transition, we don't go back. So they're working in real life. We try to put them into three or four, what we call transitional homes. So they're out working with insulin-dependent diabetics. And then the fifth home is usually where their diabetic partner will be. And that's who they will work for for the next 10, 12, 15 years, the rest of their life. Wow. That is amazing. Over that period of time, do things change? Do they become more in tune with that partner? I love that you use that word, by the way. Is there a flux that you see? They do. When we initially make the placement at team training when they initially meet their partner and start working for them, we expect them to work at over an 80% correct alert probability. So it's a very high standard. But what we see once they're placed is over the next year, they'll get up into the 90%. They'll be really, really, really accurate. And again, that goes with the bonding with the person. So the closer the bond between dog and human is, better alert work that you're gonna get out of the dog. Wow, that is amazing. And before I go on and ask you more about the nuts and bolts of administrating your organization, is this for all types of diabetes or do you find that you're more aligned with type one or type two? How does that work? We tend to be more, we define it as insulin-dependent diabetes. So that is every type one automatically, because they don't have a pancreas that's working, they cannot live if they don't take insulin. So they're automatically insulin-dependent. And we see a lot of type twos that get to the point where they actually need insulin to help them. They're highly insulin resistant or something else and they end up on an insulin regimen. And it's the insulin regimen that will throw blood sugars out of whack and have those rapid lows that can be quite costly. Wow. And what you just said makes me ask this question, do you have more a demographic of like children or adults or teens or elderly? I mean, is it just across the board? One of the things that we've really prided ourselves on is we were one of the first diabetic alert dog organizations that placed with children. Because early on I kept meeting these moms that were setting alarms and getting up every two hours just to make sure that their child was safe every single night. And as a mom myself, that really hit home because I know those first few months when you're so sleep deprived, I'm just not a good person. I just gotta admit that right off the bat. And I meet these women that had been doing this for 10 years and I was like, we need to be able to help them. And that's how EAC was created. So we do adults as well as children and we're about 75 or 77 dogs into this. And it's almost half kids and half adults. And that's just by happenstance. That wasn't by design. But when we look back at the numbers, we go, wow, it's literally half and half. Yeah, that's fascinating. I would imagine too, that as more people, moms are a powerful sort. More the word gets out in the process, it just seems like your business is gonna grow and grow and grow. Yes, we are definitely growing. And we're looking forward to growing more over the next few years. We really did some strategic planning during the pandemic when we had some downtime to figure out what our next steps were gonna be. Good deal. Well, let's talk about that a little bit because how do you reach new donors? I mean, it seems to me like you also have to educate the marketplace and the film throw up a community about what you even do. I mean, I would imagine a lot of donors are like, what, I didn't even know this existed or that this capacity existed between a human and an animal. We do, we do a lot of education. A lot of education about service dogs in general, as well as our specific service dogs about diabetes in general, as well as insulin-dependent diabetes. I mean, it's ongoing education all over the place. It was interesting because diabetic alert dogs have now been around for about 20 years, although it is still fairly common for me to introduce myself and what I do to somebody and say, I've never heard of that. And that's what we really need to correct. We really need to do education and get out there more. So interviews like this are huge for us. This is a great way of reaching out to a lot of new people who may never have heard of this. We do a lot of different types of outreach events. Our development person, I think, has done over 26 events in the last three or four months. So I mean, we are out there educating as much as we can, sharing our dogs, sharing our client stories. Of course, all of our dogs on the ground wearing a coat, they get stopped all the time. There's a lot of education there. So we are always out introducing ourselves to the public, networking with people, networking with groups. Any way we can see to get our name out there and what we do. I love it. I mean, first and foremost, you showed up. You got the logoed shirts. You got the step-up repeat. Your team's great. I noticed with the email communications, you're branded, you're fully present with that brand. And good for you because there are a lot of nonprofits that we work with that they haven't even figured that part out. And it does take literally takes years. It takes building it. It takes somebody coming in that knows what they're doing to lead it. I tend to be more on the dog side. So I knew I needed somebody in that arena to take me through that and make sure we were branding and sticking to the brand. And it's an education for us. It's an education for every nonprofit leader. You never know at all. It's about surrounding yourself with people that do, listening to their advice and making good decisions. Well, let's talk about that a little bit. How do you find your team and build your staff? I mean, we've had such an upheaval with the labor market and all of these changes. Briefly, how are you seeing that impact early canine alert? Early alert canine alert. We, I can't say that it's impacted us hugely. We are a small staff of many. We all wear different hats. Everybody does what needs to be done when we come together as a group. So when I'm looking at adding people, I'm always looking at a new team member. I need somebody that wants to be part of the team because you're gonna be doing a little bit of everything here. A lot of our roots go back to service dogs. I mean, I've been doing service dogs since the 1990s. And so you become, you get to know the people in that world. So that world, we're fairly, at least most people have heard of us in that world. But it's getting into the other two worlds. It's getting into more of the diabetic world. And we're also, it goes along with chronic disease. Diabetes is a chronic disease. You never get a day off. You don't get a vacation. So you're always looking for another tool to help you. And that's kind of where we come along. We actually have doctors now that are further patients to us. So I mean, there is no short, we have an application list of many people that are looking for dogs. We have just, you know, even if we were going a hundred miles an hour and had every funding that we needed, we would still be not servicing everyone that needs to have a dog. How long does it take to get a partner and make that arrangement from the point in time where somebody makes contact to you? It generally, it's not a first come first serve. So as the client goes through the application process, we get to know them. We get to know their likes, their dislikes, their energy level. We get to know about their diabetes because diabetes is very unique to each individual. So that's very important that we get to know what they need and where they need their support. At the same time, we have the dogs going through the training program. We're getting to know them, their energy level, what they like to do. Do they love kids? Do they like crowds? Do they want a more sedate life? We begin to see the dog's personality. Then we sit down, we have a review committee that sits down and we look at the application. We begin to think, do we have a dog that can help this person? Could it make a difference in their diabetic life? And at that point, we accept the client into the program. We begin looking for dogs specifically for them. So that can take anywhere from a year to two years. The pandemic has actually put a bit of a hole in the pipeline of dogs coming down to us. So we're looking at overcoming that, possibly starting our own breeding and puppy raising program. Wow, that's remarkable. You know, it's fascinating to me, all the hats that executive directors and their teams have to wear. I'm fascinated by the correlation of you knowing your product, knowing your service, knowing your mission and at the same time, having to be up on a medical situation, a scientific aspect that's changing. And I'd love to kind of explore that a little bit because how do you connect with donors or potential donors or steward that relationship with people who don't know early alert canines or the concept or have a need? How does that work for you all? A lot of times when we go out and we do public speaking engagements, if we're using a PowerPoint, the very first maybe five or seven slides is all about diabetes and what a chronic disease is and how it affects the person and how the dog can aid in that. So we're doing a lot of education just on that alone. And to answer your question about the medical community, again, it's coming down as the executive director. I make sure I have good medical people advising me. I am not a diabetic. I have not lived that life. I can't even imagine it. So I need those around me. I need those diabetics around me to advise me on what works, what doesn't work, what would help them, what wouldn't. We have two very good medical people on our board. The review committee I spoke of earlier. We have dog people. We have medical people. We have mothers of kids with diabetes because that's even still a little bit different than dealing with an adult with it. So we have to have all of those people represented in advising us so that we can make the best decisions that we can. That is remarkable because I feel like diabetes is, and this is just anecdotal because I'm not afflicted with that or so I don't know a lot, but just seems like from the general media and what you see that it's a changing topic. That it's like new research, new things going on. I mean, it's not the old standby that maybe we thought about it 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. That it's pretty... It has definitely changed. We're seeing a lot more adults coming, being diagnosed as type one, which before a lot of times that would happen in childhood. So now we're seeing later in life, people are becoming type one. With the pandemic, we're seeing, because type one is an autoimmune disease where the body has turned on itself and destroyed the insulin producing cells. So, and a virus can trigger that. Well, hello post-pandemic, we're seeing more ones coming up because it's actually affecting them and what's going on in their body. So, it's becoming more prevalent. Type two is still a lot more prevalent than type one, but yeah, it's definitely here, it's definitely changing and we're here to help. And that's another point I'd like to just make really quickly. Our dogs are not a fix-all. It is not gonna solve your diabetes. This is another tool in the tool chest. This helps you. Ideally, you would be able to stay in a safer range, which is gonna give you long-term outcomes that you want, but it's not going to fix. You still have to do everything you've always done to manage your disease. Interesting. I love that you said that. I think that's a fascinating and very honest comment because a lot of times we position ourselves no matter what it might be in the nonprofit sector as this kind of savior piece that we're gonna fix everything and if we can just get the money and we can just build the building or we can just get the endowment, we've solved everything. So very interesting. I really, I'm gonna ponder that quite a bit. Yeah, it's just very important because one thing I learned early in the nonprofit world is it's a lot about expectations. You have issues. If you have one expectation and somebody else has a different one, that's when you have a communication issue. So I always try to be very upfront with our expectations. Here's what we're gonna do for you. Here's what I'm gonna need from you to do for us and together this is the outcome that you can expect because if you don't explain that and you get into this and you think the dog's gonna be a magic bullet and you're not gonna have to watch your blood sugar so that's not the way this is gonna work. You have to watch it almost even closer because as the dog awards, every single time you have to stop and assess what's going on in my body, what do I need to do to correct that? Wow, fascinating. Now, I love that you brought up expectations and I'd love to pivot the conversation a little bit to that because that is one of the things and maybe just because I did a board training this weekend but that's something that we always spend a lot of time on especially with our boards. And you mentioned early on, wow, like everyone else, COVID has really shaken things up. How have you seen this situation change your organization and how do you think it's gonna impact your organization in the next, say, five or 10 years? Short term, we actually did okay. We were okay. We were able to pivot to a virtual platform for our biggest fundraiser which gave us the funds to just kinda hunker down and stay in place. So we got all of our dogs into home. We continued to support those fosters as well as any client that had any issues. And it was a frightening time for some of our clients. They're very compromised. They were terrified to go out. They wanted to know if they could wipe their dogs down with Clorox wipes, which you can't in case anybody wanted to know. But so, I mean, it was a very, all of my clients needed a lot of emotional support which is part of what this organization does as well. We don't just place a dog with you and disappear. We place a dog with you when we're there to support you throughout the lifetime of that placement. So we were there for the pandemic. It just did a lot of remote. We got very good at Zoom, okay? Did a lot of remote support and things like that. Now coming out of the pandemic, we are definitely in the next, I would say two to four years, we're going to see a shortage in the available dogs for our organization because when the pandemic closed everything down, all the big organizations stopped their breeding program and that whole will hit us about two years later. So it's going to affect the amount of dogs, how many dogs I can get, how many dogs I can place, which then rolls over to how many diabetics can I serve and that kind of a thing. So it's very definitely going to impact us for the years to come. Everybody that I know of or that I work with are now back in full bloom. We're going full staff. So I'm hoping that that shortage will be a brief window. If we could say the pandemic was a brief window, I don't know that we want to go there, but hopefully that window is closed and we can ramp back up and get into more of a production mode again. Now you mentioned briefly that you're even looking at your own breeding program. I imagine without the pandemic, you would have never really thought about that, right? I mean, is this one of those silver lining pieces where it's- Well, it's an innovation. I think as a dreamer, I think I've always thought that eventually we'll get there, but I've always thought that was down the road. That's some other time. And then coming through the pandemic and realizing we are going to have a gap, I think it kind of pushed it to the forefront. And then I'm the type that always says, okay, here's the idea. Let's do some research. Let's do a budget. Let's figure out the pieces of the puzzle we need to put together before we jump into the deep end and do this. And that's kind of where we're at right now. I do see it for the last couple of months, I've been talking to my different advisors on how should we do this? What's the most effective way? What's the budget going to look like? And I think kind of springtime, that's where we're going to be. We're going to start raising our own dogs and within that have a couple of breeders that, I mean, it'll take us two years before that dog could be bred. But I think it's a way to go. It eliminates us relying on the other organizations as much. I mean, I will still be very thankful when they donate dogs to us because it's great. But this way I can go into it and say, okay, two years from now I'm going to need 20 dogs. How many puppies do I need to produce to make that happen? So I think it's a natural next step for us. I just didn't see it coming quite this quickly. Well, you know what? I think there are two types of organizations and leaders that we've discovered during the pandemic and those that leaned in and those that took their foot off the gas pedal. And from what I'm seeing, and we are still so new, I know we've been in a slog, but when you think about only three years, the jury's still out on many things, but it seems to me like those that really did lean in and took more risk are further ahead than those that just kind of, you know, a certain amount of themselves. Yeah, we tried to use the downtime as much as we could. We transferred over to a database. We're trying to go paperless so that we can be more effective. And you know how it goes. Yeah, yeah. And I'm the type that I like to hold onto my papers. So it was them trying to pry those papers out of my hand and say, Carol, there's a better way to do this. And I had to go, yeah, there is. And it gave us the time to understand it and set it up correctly from the beginning so that we have a database that works. It gave us time to sit back and say, what are our next steps once we get going again? What are our priorities gonna be? Where do we need to go from here? And start those planning because you can have those meetings and you can talk about those dreams and how we make them a reality. And that's what we spent our time doing. And I think it was very strategic and planning. I think it was necessary. Yeah. Well, good for you. It's hard to believe our time is up. What a fascinating story and weaving, not only your mission, but how this crazy time in our philanthropic and global history, not just our philanthropic history, but how things have impacted you and how you've chosen to lead and move forward. You'll have to check back with us and let us know how things are going because it's such an interesting conundrum. And I think a lot of leaders will probably enjoy hearing this journey of yours because I think it could empower or maybe even give people more confidence about looking at different projections and risks to take. And that's basically what you're doing all the time is balancing the risk versus reward. I just really appreciate you inviting us and giving us this platform and sharing it with us so that we can share our mission and purpose with everyone out there. Feel free to reach out to me. I love to talk dog or nonprofit at any time. Yeah, well, it's really been cool. Carol Edwards, executive director, Early Alert Canines joining us from Northern California. Check out EarlyAlertCanines.org. Their website's beautifully done and it really talks about, you can actually see the journey of the different service animals and how they're placed and all that. It's fascinating work that you do. And so, yeah, we've really loved having you with us today. Again, I'm Julia Patrick, my trusty sidekick, Jared Ransom will be back with us tomorrow. Again, I wanna thank all of our presenting sponsors who've made this chat with Carol possible today. Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, Be Generous, Fundraising Academy at National University, Staffing Boutique, Nonprofit Thought Leader and the Nonprofit Nerd. These are the folks that join us day in and day out. So Carol, thank you so much. Thank you, have a great day. Hey, it's been great. As we like to end every episode, we want to remind ourselves, our viewers, our listeners to stay well so you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow, everyone.