Support Dogs, Inc.
US non-profit organization
Support Dogs, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit agency that provides assistance dogs to people with physical disabilities, and hearing dogs to those who are deaf or hard of hearing. It was founded in Columbus, Ohio, in 1981 by Sandy Maze, and is now based in St. Louis, Missouri.
Overview
Service dogs are trained to perform tasks their owners cannot, such as retrieve dropped and distant objects, open doors, pull wheelchairs, and help the client get undressed.
In addition, the dogs provide companionship and support. The dogs are trained by volunteers, including highly screened female prisoners in an Illinois maximum security prison.
Embezzlement victim
In 2005, Support Dogs discovered it had been a victim of embezzlement when ex-director Robert Hansen was accused of stealing over $400,000 from the organization over a period of five years. On September 9, 2005, Robert Hansen was convicted and sentenced to 24 months in prison and 36 months on supervised release.
The public source identifies “Support Dogs, Inc.” as uS non-profit organization. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Support, Dogs and non-profit.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7644570. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1981 and 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “Support Dogs, Inc.” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.