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On Wednesday, September 18, we hosted the annual Seeing Eye Dogs graduation event 2024, ‘Life-changing connections’.

What a privilege it is to be part of the journey of such special pups seeing them grow up to become working Seeing Eye Dogs and be matched with people who are blind or have low vision. 

Matching a Seeing Eye Dog with a client involves so many people at different stages of their lives. We ended the financial year with over 230 active Seeing Eye Dogs around the country. We’ve never had this many concurrent handlers, which was an incredible outcome to show for the amazing efforts all our volunteers, donors, partners, sponsors, staff, Vision Australia colleagues and donors put in every day of the year. 

Following from this great work, we were able to reduce the average waiting time to five months for handlers to be matched with a new Seeing Eye Dog. 

Lester Chraim, Seeing Eye Dogs client services manager shared with us ‘Our clients tell us that wait time is one of the single most important factors when choosing a service provider and we are doing extremely well on that front.

‘This is the fourth year in a row we’ve had at least 220 pups born and we have graduated more than 40 new Seeing Eye Dogs with clients. The Seeing Eye Dogs youth program and its camps is in its third year, and we are thrilled to have three young clients graduating this year. 

‘We have training hubs with instructors and puppy development trainers in NSW and QLD, to assist our regionalisation efforts, to get us closer to where our clients are and bringing us all closer together.’
 

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The official proceedings for this year’s graduation were held at Kensington Town Hall, Victoria with over 40 graduating client and Seeing Eye Dog partnerships and graduating breeding dogs. For the first time, we had Vision Australia satellite offices in NSW and WA join us with live crosses streamed via Zoom.

Seeing Eye Dogs graduation ceremony, held at Kensington Town Hall
Seeing Eye Dogs graduation ceremony, held at Kensington Town Hall

‘This is the best graduation event we’ve put on yet, amazing work from everyone who has contributed to make this a success and congratulations to the graduating alumni of 2024.’ 

— Lester Chraim