Well, it has been a very busy time for us all at Dogs for Autism since we last shared an update. Many new partnerships were established at the beginning of the year including Buddy, who many of you are familiar with. We have joined forces with a top fresh food manufacturer who supports us by feeding all our dogs in training. We have been lucky enough to be chosen as Charity of the Year by a delightful London based private school, as well as others both in our local area and beyond.

We have also been working hard to spread the word about the Charity to new audiences and hopefully you will have noticed our increased presence across social media and beyond. Read on to learn more about our exciting September campaign.

We recognise that many charities are struggling to attract and retain support, as costs continue to rise for us all, and we know that even the smallest donation makes an incredible difference when made by many. This is why we have been investing in different ways to highlight the work of the charity and grow the number of supporters who believe wholeheartedly in what we do.

In September we will be launching a campaign which we hope many people will connect with as we consider the whole ‘Back to School’ period. We draw parallels between the known anxiety this can often create and imagine the challenges for autistic young people and adults. We hope to share this message to a much wider audience and ask for our loyal supporters to share with their networks too, as a cost free way to help. We’re hopeful our charity ambassadors will also get behind the campaign and see if we can smash our target for reach alone. Watch out for further updates around this time!

Whilst we remain focused on helping as many autistic children and adults as possible, we are constrained by our income because it remains a very complex and expensive process to create highly trained life changing dogs and partnerships. Presently we estimate the cost of each partnership is in the region of £25,000; however we know is likely to be much more; as our colleagues across the sector from Guide Dogs have just announced their costs per dog are more than £100,000. These figures might feel intangible, yet we know the mitigation and real-world impact of each dog on each partnership is almost impossible to put a figure on. Our impact assessments tell us that over 90% of partnerships agree that life with an Autism Assistance Dog has improved their Quality of Life, reduced their feelings of loneliness and improved Companionships, as well as enabling greater opportunity to access everyday routine services such as attending appointments, going to school, or accessing work.

Angie Southcott

Spotlight on a Partnership

The way Louis bounds upstairs every morning for a warm, pillow snuggle is enough to put a smile on anyone’s face. Once Rose is dressed for school, she takes Louis out into the front garden while waiting for her school taxi. Having this calm moment with Louis helps Rose steady her anxieties in readiness for the school day ahead.

When Rose comes home from school, Louis is there waiting by the front door, ready to greet her with a deep-pressure cuddle—and a few sneaky kisses for good measure! Having Louis really helps Rose to ground herself after school. His calming presence and loyal affection make Rose feel wanted, loved, and content. On those days when her emotions become too overwhelming and the tears and meltdowns come, Louis seeks her out, jumps onto her lap, and licks her until she starts to giggle. It is simply amazing to see the connection between them.

Having Louis has also meant we have started going out more as a family. In the past, family trips were often too overwhelming, too noisy, or too dysregulating for Rose. Having Louis by her side gives her confidence, reassurance, comfort, and those all-important deep-pressure snuggles. He has given us a little glimpse of hope again—that we can begin to look forward to making family memories together.

When the evening comes and we are all feeling sleepy, Louis has enough love to go around for the whole family. After a crazy early-evening zoomie session that has us all giggling, he settles down for those sleepy Spaniel snuggles, and we couldn’t be happier.

The amazing work that Dogs for Autism does has truly changed our lives, and we will be forever grateful. Louis hasn’t just become part of our family—he has transformed it.

Life of an Assistance Dog: From playful pup to life-changing partner

The first year is all about early socialisation and confidence. From eight weeks old, each puppy joins a dedicated volunteer Puppy Raiser — one of the most crucial roles in our charity. With guidance from our trainers twice a week, puppies learn the basics: calm manners, recall, loose-lead walking, and settling. Just as importantly, they enjoy lots of play, enrichment, and gentle exposure to the world: cafes, buses, shops, schools, and busy streets. Early socialisation, done with care and positivity, builds resilience and optimism; a puppy that has fun exploring becomes an adult dog who can handle new places and sounds with composure. We want them to be happy, confident, and ready to take the world head-on.

After this foundation year, dogs move into Stage Two training at our centre, where the “serious work” begins — still delivered with kindness, patience, and plenty of rewards. Here, they refine excellent public obedience and learn task work tailored to autistic partners’ needs. All our dogs are taught deep pressure therapy to provide calming tactile support, road safety awareness, leading their partner out of crowded or overwhelming spaces, and interrupting specific behaviours to help break escalating cycles. Every dog also learns the basics of scent work; those with a special aptitude can progress to our scent programme, developing early-warning alerts that help anticipate and mitigate meltdowns.

Throughout their journey, our dogs live in volunteer homes. Many remain with their original Puppy Raiser until graduation; others may move to a different foster placement as circumstances evolve. This homelife matters: consistency, love, and routine underpin everything we teach.

The golden thread through every stage is wellbeing. A playful, enriched puppyhood isn’t a luxury — it’s the key to creating resilient, adaptable assistance dogs who love their job. By investing in early socialisation, positive experiences, and compassionate training, we set our dogs up to become calm, capable partners who change lives every day.

If you’d like to be part of this journey — as a Puppy Raiser, foster carer, or supporter — we’d love to hear from you. Together, we can turn wagging tails into lasting independence for autistic people and their families.

Events Roundup

More Than Fundraising – A Community Changing Lives

What does a world-famous dog show, a beautiful private garden and a village cricket match have in common?

This year, they have all become places where lives are being changed.

From meeting hundreds of dog lovers at Crufts, where several of our partnerships joined us to share their own experiences, to unforgettable Open Garden events at Philip Jackson’s home and Stavordale Priory and being Charity of the Year at the Alton Victorian Cricket Day, it’s been a remarkable few  months.

Every event we have attended has brought together people from all walks of life, united by one simple belief: that autistic children and adults deserve the opportunity to live with greater confidence, independence and freedom. Whether someone bought a raffle ticket, baked a cake, volunteered or simply stopped to chat about our work, every act of kindness has helped move us one step closer to creating another partnership.

Our year began in March at Crufts, where hundreds of visitors stopped to meet our team and discover how our dogs transform lives. Having several of our partnerships join us on the stand made it especially memorable, allowing visitors to hear directly from the families whose lives have been changed by an assistance dog.

June brought two of the highlights of our year.

The Open Garden events at the home of renowned sculptor Philip Jackson and at Stavordale Priory where we welcomed hundreds of visitors and, thanks to the generosity of everyone involved, raised more than £12,000 towards training future assistance dogs.

That success belonged to so many people – our generous hosts, volunteers who welcomed guests, directed traffic and served refreshments, those who donated raffle prizes, baked cakes and encouraged friends and family to come along. Every single contribution made a difference.

We were also proud to be Charity of the Year at Alton Victorian Cricket Day, where visitors met some of our puppies in training while enjoying a wonderful community event. It was another reminder that fundraising is about bringing people together behind a cause they believe in.

And we are far from finished.

Later this month we will be at the New Forest & Hampshire County Show from 28th July, before returning to one of our favourite events of the year – the Blackmoor Apple Tasting Day on Saturday 11th October. We would love to see you there.

Corporate Partnerships

Some partnerships raise money. The best ones change lives.

This year we have worked alongside organisations that didn’t just choose us as a charity partner, they became part of our story. By sharing what we do, raising funds and spreading the word, they are helping more autistic children and adults discover what an assistance dog can do.

We are delighted that Aurora is supporting us for a second year, including sponsoring one of our dogs in training. Every session, every new experience, every milestone this puppy reaches is possible because of supporters who believe in the difference these remarkable dogs can make. Having a partner committed to investing in a dog’s journey from the very beginning is something we are incredibly grateful for.

Since the end of 2025, Butternut Box has been feeding all our dogs in training with fresh, tailored meals. Nutrition matters hugely during training, and having a corporate partner take care of it is one less thing for our team to worry about, and one more way our dogs are properly looked after.

We are thrilled that Raffle House are continuing to support us; their house prize draws let people dream big while supporting causes they care about. Every entry that nominates Dogs for Autism helps fund a dog’s training and introduces our charity to people who may never have heard of us before.

Our friends at Canine Life Supplies continue to support us through their Senior Support supplements, donating £1 from every pot sold. It’s a simple idea, and those pounds add up, helping fund training, equipment and the care our dogs need throughout their journey.

Each of these partnerships shares a belief that businesses can make a real difference. Whether through sponsorship, fundraising or simply spreading the word, every organisation helps us reach more autistic people and families across the UK.

As Dogs for Autism grows, so does our need for more partners like these. Every partnership, large or small, helps us train more dogs and support more families.

To every business standing alongside us: thank you. You are helping transform lives, and we couldn’t do it without you.

Growing our Community

Since January, we have been actively trying to improve our reach, engagement and audience on social media, while creating a strong brand identity online.

We have been doing this in a few different ways:

• Using brand colours and fonts, as well as the brand logo, consistently throughout our social media posts.
• Creating new graphics that use existing aspects of our branding, to give our new content a fresh but recognisable look.
• Posting on multiple social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok, to ensure we are reaching a broad audience.
• Posting at least 7 times a week on Facebook (ideally once a day) and as much as possible on the other social media platforms we have mentioned.
• Trying to keep a balance in our content, so that we have a good mix of more corporate-related posts, posts about our charity/ dogs and more friendly ‘just for fun’ type posts.
• Sharing a range of photo and video content.
• Being selective with hashtag usage, to target our audience more specifically based on their interests.
• Documenting and analysing data from social media and Google Analytics that gives us insight into what’s working well so we can tailor our content to suit our audience.

So far, we have seen great results from these efforts. Since January…

• Facebook followers have gone up by 9.17%
• Instagram followers have gone up by 25.70%
• LinkedIn followers have gone up by 13.09%
• TikTok followers have gone up by 74.33%

Increasing our followers on these platforms is beneficial because it helps spread awareness about the charity. By increasing our followers, we have more people seeing our posts about the life-changing support our autism assistance dogs offer and the work we do, on a regular basis. Being shown consistent branding and messaging builds up trust, makes people more likely to notice our brand and increases the likelihood of converting a person from a passive audience member into a donor.

Having more followers also helps improve our credibility; if a potential audience member can see we have already built-up trust with a growing community of followers, they are more likely to give their trust as well. There is also a potential benefit from a corporate partnership point of view, as when building relationships with businesses, we can incentivise them by offering to promote the partnership on these platforms.

We have also had consistent engagement since starting this push on social media, which is fantastic, as more engagement means that the social media algorithms are getting data that suggests people are enjoying the content, so our content is shown to keep people on their platforms. Due to this, the sites are more likely to prioritise showing people our posts. This allows us to reach even more people and continue to grow our community.
With this in mind, we wanted to share some easy ways to support Dogs for Autism that have no cost:

• Follow us on socials: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok.
• Liking, commenting or sharing a post (or all three!)

Going forward, we intend to continue to share content consistently on social media that connects with our audience and allows us to continue to expand our community.

Fundraising Strategy – looking ahead

Over the last six months, we have continued to grow our income through a range of fundraising activities, including community fundraising, support from trusts and foundations, and partnerships with corporate organisations.

• The calendar has been full of successful community fundraising events, talks and presentations, with more still to come.
• We are immensely grateful for the support we have received from charitable trusts. We successfully secured funding this year from the National Lottery and several generous charitable trusts who have recognised the incredible work our dogs are doing every day alongside their autistic partners. Grants from charitable trusts are vital for every aspect of our charitable work, from taking our puppies on fun training outings to visiting our beneficiary families in their homes across the UK from Cornwall to Scotland.
• Our corporate income is also continuing to grow. As well as making financial contributions, many companies help to raise awareness of our work through colleague fundraising activities, workplace events and by choosing us as their Charity of the Year.

We have ambitious plans to increase our income to support more life-changing partnerships and their families through an assistance dog. Alongside our fundraising events, talks programme and presentations, we’re reaching out and developing new corporate partnerships, creating new opportunities for schools and community groups, expanding our volunteer network and improving how we keep in touch with our supporters. We continue to grow our trusts and foundations portfolio, applying to more grant-makers and seeking higher-value funding opportunities, to help us secure sustainable income and create more partnerships.

We always need your help and would love to hear from you if you can introduce us to an organisation that might want to support our work. This could be a company where you, a family member, or a friend works, or perhaps a charitable trust, foundation, or other organisation that you have a connection with. If you are a Trustee of a charitable trust, or know someone who is, you could play a vital role in helping us reach more autistic children and adults across the UK. Personal introductions could make a significant difference, and we are always excited to explore opportunities that can help us grow our impact and reach more people. 

Thank you for all your support

How you can help

Leaving a Lasting Legacy

If you have ever wondered how you could make a lasting difference to the lives of autistic people and their families, one of the most meaningful ways is by leaving a gift in your Will. Every gift, no matter its size, helps ensure that more autism assistance dogs can be trained and supported in the years to come.

After looking after your loved ones, a gift in your Will could help create life-changing partnerships for future generations. If you would like to find out more, we would be delighted to have a confidential, no-obligation conversation with you.