Letters from the President

December, 2008 -

Happy New Year Everyone. Wilderwood would like to extend a heartfelt thank you and warm wishes to all who have followed our progress this past year. We are looking forward to providing excellent service to our clients and community in 2009. Many of our working teams have "checked in" this Christmas Season and their stories of progress and love were such an inspiration to me and Wilderwood's staff.

We continue to work hard with Maryville College in research concerning the child/dog bond and hope to present our preliminary findings at the 2009 ASA Conference in IL. We also hope to continue to develop some very new and exciting relationships with local breeders so that we can continue to place the best dogs available for our clients. We continue to need your financial support in order to meet our growing needs. Wilderwood is striving to offer extremely low prices for our dogs, in hopes that they remain available to all families.

Our new puppies are taking over the kennels and the XYZ goldens are full of themselves as they trot about the community.

Best Wishes to all of you this coming year and God Bless.

Tiffany

June, 2008 -

I am excited to share with you that Wilderwood has joined with Maryville College in a 5 year study of children with autism and service dogs. By following the families with child assessment tests and film footage, we are looking to provide empirical data on the phenomenal results we are obtaining through our work here. There is only one other study of this kind ever done, so we are really doing some groundbreaking research. I look forward to sharing the results as they are obtained.

I wish I had time and space to share with you each and every heart warming story of our dogs and the lives they are changing. I hope our readers continue to become more involved. We are always in need of puppy foster homes; we are recruiting board members and are always in need of financial backers. We feel it is part of our mission to keep our service dogs financially available to everyone. We can only continue to do this with the support of people like you. Thank you for following our growing progress.

- Tiffany Denyer, President

January, 2008 -

I am living a life I can hardly describe as I grow with Wilderwood. We recently had a graduation on December 13th, 2007. I loved the dogs that graduated very much. I shared tears of anxious separation during the commencement ceremony. However, no one there could deny the awesome work these two dogs were doing in the lives of the families they had met only a week earlier. The little boy Brody, with his handsome blonde service dog Millo, had undergone nothing short of miraculous changes. During Brody’s first day of class, he could not sit still, was climbing on his parents, running around room, throwing things on the floor and generally being a little tornado. By graduation day, Brody and his dog were sitting quietly at the table and eating dinner. He had shown this skill could be accomplished for a period of 90 minuets. A true miracle for the family. My other team left not a dry eye in the house as she described her struggle with Parkinson. I must share with you that this is a lady who seven days earlier could barely walk (with assistance) into the classroom. Readers, she left the graduation with her dog by her side and not a limp in sight.

We do what we do here at Wilderwood because there are very few people who will ever experience a cool winter night outside of a restaurant and know they really made a difference in someone’s life.

July 31, 2007 -

Though the summer season will be winding down, we here at Wilderwood are going strong. Our staff is very proud of the three new puppy additions as well as extending a warm welcome to three new staff members. A grateful thank you goes out to Maryville and Knoxville, TN as they continue to support our work and are our biggest cheerleaders. We have several upcoming graduations as well as an exciting new relationship with a service dog organization from Nashville, TN. Our staff and puppies are growing at amazing rates and as President it is often hard to keep up with them all! This continues to be a work of God as we see over and over again the miracles our dogs are producing in the lives of their new handlers. We are especially blessed by our ever growing Spectrum Disorder program. Wilderwood is hoping to be able to attend several Autism conferences in 2008. We hope to get the word out about this amazing process as well as seek funding for a new research program involving the results of service dogs and autism. Thank you for visiting us and please continue to visit us and become a member of our extended family.

March 28, 2007 -

I would like to thank you all for taking the time to visit our web site. We do quarterly updates and hope you find them both entertaining and informative. We have had an exciting year and a half. It is difficult for me to believe it’s been that short and yet that long. We have some wonderful puppies in the program and are grateful that our community support continues to grow. Like most non-profits we struggle financially month to month but we have still been able to successfully at two part-time trainer positions. With the addition of these skilled and dedicated staff members, our puppies now receive and even more thorough and intense education. Don’t worry; they still love every minute of it. We hope you continue to refer us to your friends and family and participate in our fundraisers.

The board and I have decided to hold four fundraisers a year. A spring mailing, children’s summer camp, fall adult/dog trip and Christmas de-stress booth at Wal-Mart. We are particularly excited about the addition of our summer camp. It will be held in Maryville, TN for children and their dogs ages 9-14 on June 4th-8th and another one June 18th-20th. We will have guest speakers, crafts, look-a-like contests, teach basic canine obedience and much more. We hope you will participate and make this first of its kind camp a huge success.

The staff here at Wilderwood are touching lives everyday. Through the people we meet on the street that stop to de-stress with our puppies, to the families of the new service dog handlers. We love what we do, we are good at it and we hope you soon find a place in our family by becoming involved. We hope you all have a great 2007 and remember to get out and enjoy the beauty around us... especially with your loved canine.

An excerpt from one of my staff’s days is just one of the many reasons we do this job, below. :)

“There are certain advantages and disadvantages to raising a large dog around my pack of small dogs. He does get socialization with several types of personalities, plenty of playing and learning how to cope with them. Then there are the disadvantages, one of which is not understanding that he is a big dog and things that fit a small dog will not fit him. He is not learning that his opinion of himself is a little off. That a five pound dog is a tiny bit smaller than a fifty pound hound. I am debating on weather to try to explain this to him or just turn my head and pretend he is okay.”
Koa in a basket

November 18, 2005 -

Hello everyone, my name is Tiffany and I'm the president of Wilderwood. This organization was born out of dreams, sweat and tears, and I'm proud to be a part of it. We opened our doors in Maryville, TN on August 1st 2005. We are looking forward to starting our first High School program in the spring of 2006. In a few short months we have built our kennels and office, began training our first service dogs and currently have several contracts with clients with disabilities. We are finishing up our first fundraiser and are having a Christmas Party December 9th. Feewww!

I am a psychiatric nurse by trade and have been involved in psych care and nursing for 11 years. I have seen a lot of treatment modalities in that time. I have given a lot of medication. I deal daily with brain trauma, autism, emotional illness, dementia, and Alzheimer. I have also been involved with dogs since childhood. I have trained dogs in obedience, animal assisted therapy and service dog work. Wilderwood is an outgrowth of those life experiences.

In all my experience I have never seen anything, and I can safely say ANYTHING that has been more therapeutic than animal/human interaction. What happens to a person's soul and then their perception in the presence of a beloved animal is far reaching. That relationship impacts a person's life more than a therapist, medicine, treatment programs or all of them combined, in that reality, Wilderwood finds its passion.

Our dogs help individuals gain independence (emotional and physical). Our dogs provide unconditional love and support. They assist in all facets of life such as: retrieval of anything (including meds), opening doors, turning on lights, support during a crisis, able to call for emergency assistance and much more. We are excited to be a part of something so wonderful.

Wilderwood also has an at-risk teen outreach program. We teach teens to train service dogs! It is a remarkable program and the kids and dogs love it. We are happy to be here, happy you came to visit our site and are expectant of great things for and from our organization. Continue to visit us for ongoing updates and new client testimonials on this page. Thank you and have a great day.