An Interview with Rob Stewart, Executive Director of New Horizons in Seattle, WA

New Horizons is a nonprofit in Seattle, Washington with a mission to end homelessness, one young person at a time. They offer several programs to facilitate youth’s transition out of homelessness, including a shelter, drop-in center, case management, and job training. New Horizons’ services are animal-inclusive, allowing staff and participants to include their companion animals in all aspects of care. Rob Stewart, Executive Director of New Horizons in Seattle, Washington, sat down with My Dog Is My Home for an interview about the animal-inclusive services they provide to youth and young adult program participants. If your organization is looking to further low-barrier and trauma-informed services by becoming animal-inclusive, reach out to My Dog Is My Home at info@mydogismyhome.org for technical support and connection to resources.

The following is an edited transcript of our conversation, with further details about programming, how animals are included in programming, pet care agreements/operating procedures, and more.

MDIMH: We are hoping to do this third blog post as a spotlight on an organization that serves youth experiencing homelessness and is already animal-inclusive. Can you tell us a little bit about the programming that you offer at New Horizons and if animals are included in all of the spaces or just some?

Rob Stewart (RS): New Horizons has been around for about 45 years and it has really changed. It was a very small organization that offered drop-in services until probably about 10 years ago, and then we developed our emergency shelter. Our biggest focus is on Housing Support Services. We work with young adults who are at the literal intersection of experiencing homelessness. From that point we work with them to move them into housing as quickly as we can. Our strategic initiative as an organization is to move 70% of our young people into housing within 100 days. To accomplish this, we focus and throw a lot of our resources at being highly, highly relational and in-tune with what our young people are doing. Through this we can then support them through wrap-around case management with the goal of moving them into their self-directed housing option, and whatever they think will bring them stability at the next stage.

We are animal inclusive across the board. Staff, and everyone is able to have their animals here on site and every program. There’s really no program that we would run where we disallow it. Even our shelter, which uses individualized spaces for young adults, has space for pets. We've had a variety of pets over the years here. We also run health clinics and we have some great partners that come in and do veterinary clinics. We have a One Health partnership, which provides services for both human health and pet health simultaneously. There is enormous intersection for the people that we serve.

MDIMH: Has New Horizons always been pet inclusive. If not, when did you transition to becoming pet inclusive and what was that process like?

RS: I can’t speak to what New Horizons’ pet policies were years and years and years ago, but part of who we are as an organization is that we want to be small and boutique. We focus a whole lot on depth of connection, depth of relationship, and the efficacy of our work versus the mass size of our organization. We’ve always been funky like that. I think we have always been hyper-relational across the board, and have always focused on the community development aspect of what we do. Part of our approach to developing a safe community for young people that often don’t have those meaningful connections has always been to ask ourselves, ‘What does it mean to do that well?’ You have to meaningfully include people’s pets, and that’s for both staff and for the people we serve. New Horizons wants to be as accommodating and as low-barrier as we possibly can for young people.

So as far back as I can remember we have welcomed animals, and it’s just in the ethos of who we are…this boutique place that wants to just be as accommodating as we possibly can, and as low-barrier as we possibly can for young people. That’s really what drives us to do it. And people love dogs.

MDIMH: There are some shelters that fully integrate animals into their spaces or social service programs, so they’re allowed in any of the areas, and there are other shelters where they’re in a separate space or in kennels. How do you house animals in your facilities?

RS: They sleep on the beds with our young adults, they’re in our meetings, and they’re in case management meetings. There are no kennels per se unless the animal specifically would require that. Sometimes we go so far as to put our pets on community agreements if they are having difficulty being in a space that’s a bit chaotic. It certainly happens where there are dogs that lash out or animals that potentially just cannot exist in the space well. So sometimes, just for the safety of everyone, we will ask people to kennel their dog if they’re not directly holding them or on leash. Our clients have to keep the dogs with them and maintain them, but they are able to roam around with their people.

We always say that the root cause of youth and young adult homelessness is fractured relationships, whether that’s a fractured relationship that reaches all the way back to their earliest childhood or if it’s fractured relationship increasingly with behavioral and mental health programs and providers who they used to have constant relationships with. This is at the root cause and many of them feel that disconnect. Homelessness is profoundly lonely. It just really is. A lot of young adults are looking for meaningful connection, and sometimes they decide that they’re going to adopt a pet even if they don’t fully understand what they’re getting themselves into. So we’ve increasingly done a lot more education with our young people around what it means to appropriately take care of an animal and how you do that well. How do you ensure that they’re being fed correctly? Do you have access to food? Do you have access to the things that they would need?

We’ve had some great moments, and we’ve had some real tragedies. We’ve had young people who have mismanaged their animals, and we’ll have to work with them and people who can help them find better foster situations if they’re just not able to maintain them. So we’ve worked really hard to make sure that our young people know how to care for the animal, because it’s also about community health here - how do we make sure that the animal is okay? We have a massive number of pet lovers on staff here, so they’re on top of incorporating these concepts into our services and relationships.

MDIMH: Is it the responsibility of all staff and all young adults in the programs to ensure the well-being of animals and people existing together? Or is there a specific person or a partnership, including or aside from the One Health Clinic with veterinary and human health professionals?

RS: Every person that brings a pet agrees to a pet policy that we hold. [See New Horizons’ sample pet agreement below.] Really, it is about taking care of the animal, making sure the animal is appropriately interacting in the space, all of those things. So there is a community agreement around how pets can exist in our space. And it’s everyone’s job, frankly, to manage and be a part of upholding that expectation. I have even sat in a meeting myself with a young adult and just said, “Let’s do some community agreements about your animal.” But if things rise to the level of needing to be addressed, then we typically loop in their case manager, loop in the person who’s program that they are in, and talk to them.

If it requires us bringing in outside support, we would certainly go to One Health, and we would go to other agencies that can temporarily foster animals. Certainly, when it feels like we are out of our depth, we will bring in expertise to help us understand how to support. Recently, this year we supported a client’s young dog that had a leg amputated. That was outside of our expertise, and so we brought in One Health and they helped do an enormous amount of fundraising support in that area.

We prioritize staffs’ meaningful interaction in programs. So it doesn’t matter what level you are in the organization, you have to be involved with programming. Even if you are not directly leading the program, you better be mopping the floors, serving meals every once in a while, and know the young adults’ names. It is a part of who we are, an expectation that we have. You can’t do the work well unless we do that.

MDIMH: Are there things in your pet agreement that other organizations looking to co-shelter humans and animals together may find helpful?

RS: There are things that we’ve learned over time. Community is really fragile in the work that we do, and as a result of that relationships are formed in expedited fashions. Sometimes trust is built when trust ought not be built. Often, people used to hand over their pets to anyone that would be willing to watch it, and then sometimes that pet would be mishandled, taken away, or moved to a different place. So we really stress that if this is your animal, it is your job to take care of this animal and not the job of another young adult. We’re pretty stern about that because we have seen that not go well.

I also think again, there are some limits to what we would do. I know that there are times that some young adults say, “I want to adopt,” or “I just adopted a whole litter of kittens.” They may not be in the position to actually manage that, so we’ll work with them. We work really closely with young adults. Whatever is in the agreement did not come from a series of books that we ripped it out of. It’s just from practice - what works and what do we see really go haywire. For the most part, pets are awesome. They don’t cause huge issues, and we don’t have to mitigate an enormous number of problems. On occasion we have a dog nip at someone, but it is really, really minimal. It doesn’t happen often. For the most part, young adults manage their animals really well and with a lot of care. These animals are their families, this is one of the most important things in their life, so they honor the pet as best as they can. Sometimes they lack the resources to do that well, but for the most part, I have young adults bring me pictures of their dogs as if they’re their children. It is awesome and I enjoy it.

MDIMH: Did you have any challenges when you first started? Many bring up concerns about insurance or things of that nature. Have you ever worked through that, or had to overcome any challenges like that?

RS: My honest answer to that is we’re working with a vulnerable population, and many of them are struggling with not having access to meaningful mental health support. And yes, we have lots of incidents, and rarely are they related to animals. When our insurance premiums go up because of some massive incident, it’s not because a dog went haywire. It’s because we don’t have appropriate support across the continuum to help our young people who have mental health concerns co-occurring with behavioral health. That’s the bigger issue. I’ve never seen an insurance premium go up because they say, “Oh, you have kittens on site - that’s too much.”

MDIMH: Aside from the Pet Care Agreement, do you have any other standard operating procedures in regards to being pet-inclusive that other organizations might find helpful?

RS: Largely it’s the pet care agreement that governs it. A lot of that is somewhat logistical. Who takes care of the animal, how does that animal get taken care of, those kinds of things. I don’t think you could do it well, unless you are willing to have all the things that the pets need. So we obviously supply all of that - toys, food, all of that stuff. It seems like that is an important component to it.

We don’t allow staff to watch the animals, unless the client is asking for help with fostering their animal. We won’t maintain the animals. Some of the reason is to help the young people build responsibility, but it’s also the same client-staff dynamic where we don’t want to be responsible for this thing that’s really sacred to you. We want you to figure out how to take care of the animal. It doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t let the animals stay with us during a meeting or something like that, but we would never take the pet home for instance.

MDIMH: If youth are off-site for employment or other things that they’re taking care of, are the animals required to go with them, or how does that generally work?

RS: Yeah, they would have to do that. We just don’t have the space or the staffing to do that. A lot of our young people work. When they are off site, we obviously can’t manage who watches their animal but usually a friend or a partner would watch their animal. We just don’t have the staff to do that.

MDIMH: Do you have a favorite story, or can you describe the best part of being animal inclusive?

RS: One of our young people did have a dog that got a really bad infection and they had to have their leg removed. In doing that, there were some really tough conversations that led to really good outcomes. I think helping both that individual and the animal find care was really good. The animal is healthy and happy and the individual really understands more and more of what it means to care for the animal, and continues to do a really good job in housing. I think that’s really neat. I still see pictures of the dog and see them on Wednesdays when they come in for the vet clinic.

Click here to see New Horizons’ Sample Pet Agreement (2022)