{"id":17,"date":"2004-03-07T00:34:03","date_gmt":"2004-03-07T05:34:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.minnesotageek.net\/wordpress\/?p=17"},"modified":"2004-12-29T00:33:23","modified_gmt":"2004-12-29T05:33:23","slug":"the-loss-of-a-new-friend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.minnesotageek.net\/wordpress\/?p=17","title":{"rendered":"The Loss of a New Friend"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Those of you who know me, know that I&#8217;m heavily involved in a non-profit organization called Helping Paws. The mission of Helping Paws is to further the independence of individuals with disabilities through the use of service dogs. This is a mission I strongly believe in. Because of this, I&#8217;ve done lots of things for Helping Paws over the last seven years, including my current role as the Vice President of the Helping Paws Board of Directors.<\/p>\n<p>The past several months have been a time of transition at Helping Paws. Our Director of Development for almost five years decided it was time to move on to other opportunities. We spent several months finding a worthy replacement, which was a difficult task. We found our replacement in a man named Dale. Dale started on March 1. Today I received a phone call that Dale had unexpectedly died this morning. I was stunned. He had only been with us for a week.<\/p>\n<p>I have to admit that I&#8217;m sad on multiple fronts. As a person I feel awful for Dale&#8217;s partner and their families. I can&#8217;t even imagine how hard this must be for them. My thoughts and prayers are with them as they deal with this dark time in their lives. As a Helping Paws board member I&#8217;m saddened that we will never get the opportunity to work with an individual who had so much to contribute to our organization. Even though we knew him for only a short time, he had an impact on all of us. Now we have the unenviable task of finding his successor. Wish us all luck and pray for Dale&#8217;s family.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Those of you who know me, know that I&#8217;m heavily involved in a non-profit organization called Helping Paws. The mission of Helping Paws is to further the independence of individuals with disabilities through the use of service dogs. This is a mission I strongly believe in. Because of this, I&#8217;ve done lots of things for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-helping-paws"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.minnesotageek.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.minnesotageek.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.minnesotageek.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.minnesotageek.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.minnesotageek.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.minnesotageek.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.minnesotageek.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.minnesotageek.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.minnesotageek.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}