Our Mission

At Home Front K9 Project, our mission is to donate highly trained K9 companions to active duty Special Forces families and Disabled Veterans.  We seek to make a difference in their lives today, a difference that can be seen for a lifetime.

The Warrior and Peace of Mind

The tempo of the Special Forces community is such that they are likely away more than they are home. With training and deployments days tally well over 300 in a year’s time, the family is left to keep the home front safe and secure. In this day, when many groups are targeting the families of military members, the task of managing the home can be a lonely, arduous mission. By placement of a highly trained K9, the second aspect of our mission is met. The spouse and children now have the support to aid in this mission. A dog is by its very nature, is a visual deterrent. A family that can otherwise be seen as an easy target, is now a challenge in the sight and minds of those meant to do them harm. For a child, the dog feels like a bit of the service member is still part of their world. For the Operators, knowing that their family is safe gives them the mental relief and the ability to focus on the mission at hand.

The Family

Ask any military spouse or service member and they will tell you the return from a deployment is not as picture perfect as many would believe.  Communication having to be relearned, experiences of the service member being misunderstood, missing the adventures of the family in the warrior’s absence, missing the growth of the children that make an impact on the dynamics of the family. Quickly, a great chasm of all that is different begins to form.  Through Home Front K9 Project, our third mission is bridging this gap. When returning, the family is invited to bring their Home Front K9 to our retreat at Deep Woods USA in sunny Florida. This is a weekend of family and team building engagements all revolving around the dog.  Through working and learning to communicate effectively with their dog, together as a team, the family can see improvement in communication and begun to repair the bond that once was.  A Home Front K9 can build strong families that will weather the storm of military life.

The Home

We see the overwhelming and immeasurable benefit that the K9 companion can provide to the service member after they are out of active duty.  This is a fact hardly disputed.  If the dog can provide such a benefit after the service members are banged up and broken from the scars of war, what would have been the outcome if we were not proactive and placed the K9 earlier into the lives of the service members and their families? Would the service member still be with us today? Why do we wait? With a Home Front K9 companion, the service member can move about in public again, regains trust in others, develops ways to ward off anger before it is a problem, interpret facial expression accurately, and sleep comes easier.  At Home Front K9, one aspect of our mission is to make a difference in the lives of our warriors now! This is a difference that will surely affect not only the future of the service member, but also the relationships and lives of their family.