Many of you have seen our honorary Guilty One and 4-legged friend TAG at the stage door and wondered, "What up with the dog?" Well TAG is not your typical yellow lab but a PAWS & EFFECT service dog in training and he needs your help. SA "Adults" Angela Reed and Todd Cerveris have been volunteering to help train TAG for his debut as a full fledged service dog and now the time has arrived for a young man with Multiple Sclerosis to receive TAG's love and guiding paw.
In order for this to happen, however, the full cost needs to be fundraised. Donations can be placed online by simply clicking this link -
http://paws-effect.org.
Todd has written a letter to all Totally Trucked Fan and can be read in full below. In the meantime, check out this exclusive vid brought to you by TAG himself...
Dear Totally Trucked Fans,
Recently, while on tour with SPRING AWAKENING, my wife Angie (your friendly, neighborhood "Adult Female") and I (understudy to the "Adult Male") made the acquaintance of Paws and Effect, an organization in Des Moines, Iowa that specializes in the care & training of therapy dogs and service dogs.
In the Spring of 2009, while on the road, we ended up taking care of a P&E service-dog-in-training, a 9-month-old yellow lab named Tag. His skill set was already advanced; our charge was very simple: expose him to the rigors of travel. He became a favorite of the cast & crew. I'm sure many of you saw him at the stage door, in his service vest, learning the ropes.
Tag’s now fully-trained and ready for service. His future recipient suffers from multiple sclerosis. He’s wheelchair-bound. His speech is mildly affected. He's a student graduating from college this December and plans to pursue a career in human services. He'll rely on Tag to answer the phone, to open doors, to pick up items he's dropped. To serve as his hands, and sometimes his legs. Paws & Effect has committed to making the placement, however a well-trained service dog is not cheap; so we're helping raise funds to cover the rest.
There’s a grant application in the works, private donors have been contacted, but neither will come close to meeting the full cost. Which is why I am pleased to announce Paws & Effect’s current fundraising effort -
http://paws-effect.orgI won’t be coy – I’m asking for a donation (
http://paws-effect.org)
It's a chance to make a single, straight-forward improvement in one person's quality of life. It's a chance to know you've had a direct and immediate impact. And one important element of a challenge like this is knowing that several…many…hundreds…even thousands of people out there want to help make it right.
In other words, it’s perfectly fine if your donation amount is small. Perfectly fine. But let’s help make the number of actual donorsbig. Enormous. GIGANTIC.
If there's one lesson to be taken away from a show like SPRING AWAKENING, it's that we are not alone in this life. We all need each other's help, support, and compassion. Please, won’t you consider making a donation? And please, tell your friends.
Your donation is tax-deductible, and please know that 100% of all donations go directly towards the cost of care, training, and veterinary expense of placing Tag. Awash as we all are with vague pleas for generic help, with only the presumed impact of social good – here’s a way you can help change one person’s life. Easily. Directly. Profoundly.
Thanks for your help & best wishes to you all this holiday season,
Todd Cerveris
