Connected to Our Community: From Office Pet to Adopted!

Since 2019, Great Plains SPCA has partnered with the Leawood Police Department to provide a dog’s day out for our shelter dogs. Each month the Leawood Police Department helps provide a break from the shelter for our good boys and girls, resulting in four adoptions from city employees. This program not only gives our shelter pups exposure to possible adopters, but provides the dog an opportunity to get out of the shelter and socialize with people. New sights, sounds and smells…sounds like a win-win situation for these lucky dogs! Jeff Culbertson with the Leawood Police Department shares a little more about the outings.

“I began this program in September of 2019. Each month I connect with Great Plains SPCA and pick up a dog that they feel would fit our environment for the day. This usually occurs on the last Friday of the month, depending on staff availability, holidays, and days off. As with most everything else in the world, the program was shut down for several months because of COVID in 2020. It did resume and is still a favorite day for many staff members. To date, we have had four dogs adopted by employees of the Leawood Police Department and the City of Leawood (with a red border). It is comforting to know that these dogs are now a part of a family forever. I try to track all the dogs brought to Leawood and have noticed all of them have been adopted, usually within a week of coming to Leawood, except one. That one is Opie, which is the blind dog we had, but he is in a foster home at this time. He is one of the happiest dogs I’ve had in this program, so I’m really hoping he’ll find his forever home soon. I hope you enjoy this program as much as I do and maybe even adopt one of our future visitors. I have added photos of our guests below, along with the month and year they were here. I’m missing photos from a couple months early in the program, but every one of these dogs has been outstanding.” – Jeff Culbertson

We are proud to partner with the communities we serve. Great Plains SPCA has contracts with nine municipalities in the Kansas City metro area including Overland Park, Leawood, Lenexa, Prairie Village, Shawnee, Bonner Springs, Lake Quivira and Johnson County Parks Department and the Johnson County Sheriff’s Department. If you live in one of these municipalities and your pet is lost, Animal Control Officers will bring them to us when found. Thanks to our partnerships with the communities we serve, we reunited 385 lost pets with their families in 2022.

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