The Milford Youth Center would like to thank the Greater Milford Community Health Network for awarding the Youth Center and Community Impact Inc. a grant to support a comfort dog pilot program & Animal Assisted Therapy (AAT) for youths!
This program will have two phases. The first will be to create a Comfort Dog Pilot program, which utilizes a temperamentally tested and AKC certified comfort animal to be incorporated into MYC youth programming; the second phase will be to partner with Community Impact Inc. to provide community outpatient individual AAT programming to MYC youths at the MYC facility. Through the provision of an AAT program, the MYC wishes to address Community Health Improvement Plan (CHIP) Priority Area 2: Mental Health and Substance Abuse, and will particularly address the following:
- Objective 2.1: Decrease the number of middle and high school students’ overall reports of feeling “very” stressed in the past 30 days and youth who reported feeling depressive symptoms in the past 12 months.
We can’t wait to see this program start and thank you again to the generosity of the Greater Milford Community Health Network!