2024 Impact Report

Dogs Playing for Life (DPFL) is a nonprofit animal welfare organization with a mission to redefine the meaning and importance of quality of life for all sheltered dogs by improving their experience through playgroups and individualized training, resulting in urgent and responsible lifesaving.

In 2009, DPFL Founder and CEO, Aimee Sadler, began offering playgroup seminars to shelters and rescues across North America, providing these organizations with the skills and practical knowledge to implement and maintain successful playgroups for their dogs. These seminars, and the programs they inspired, have enhanced quality of life and improved outcomes for countless shelter dogs across North America. 

Though playgroups remain the cornerstone of our programming, DPFL’s contributions to canine wellbeing have expanded and developed over the years.

• 2015: DPFL began offering our Level I Mentorship, focusing on playgroups, kennel routines, and basic Fancy Footwork – DPFL’s approach to loose-leash walking
• 2017: DPFL opened its Canine Center Florida (CCF), an advanced board-and-train facility serving sheltered dogs at risk of behavioral euthanasia
• 2018: DPFL’s shadow program began helping shelter personnel and others interested in learning from CCF’s exceptional trainers to advance their skills
• 2019: DPFL began welcoming next-level students and mentees to CCF for our newest Level II Mentorship
• 2022: DPFL began embedding within the largest municipal shelters to cultivate the next generation of canine caregivers. The first partnership of this kind, with Los Angeles Animal Services, began in September.
• 2023: DPFL began offering a Stranger Danger Mentorship, an additional Level 2 program out of CCF, which focused on routines and protocols to support wary-of-strangers dogs. We also embedded a staff member at Jacksonville Animal Care and Protective Services as part of an ongoing effort to support and promote playgroups in the state of Florida.
• 2024: Our work in Los Angeles expanded, as did our efforts to promote playgroups throughout the state of Florida via a generous grant from Florida Leaders in Lifesaving and Best Friends Animal Society.

Each year, we take a close look at our programming through the lens of our extensive data set and examine industry-wide trends with a view toward how we can better support shelters, shelter personnel, and shelter dogs. 

What follows are lessons learned, discussions of advancements in the animal welfare field, and benefits experienced by shelters that have implemented our programming. We examine the ways in which DPFL playgroups and other programs can offer vast improvements in areas such as quality of life, lifesaving, shelter operations, and staff experiences. 

This report offers an in-depth look at the responses from our pre- and post-seminar surveys, provides a review of developments at our Canine Center Florida and with our other in-person programs and virtual offerings, and maps out the framework for DPFL to implement changes needed to remain an invaluable resource to the animal welfare industry.