Your gift of any size today creates freedom for those who experience disabilities.
Every nonprofit has a story. Ours begins with a daughter.
Domino Service Dogs was founded in honor of Caitlin Tyra Brady, whose courage, compassion, and deep love for dogs inspired her mother, Barbara Henry, to take action. When Caitlin was injured and began using a wheelchair, her family quickly encountered the formidable barriers surrounding service dog acquisition: price tags running upward of $25,000 to $45,000, multi-year waiting lists, and limited access to qualified local instruction.
Refusing to let those obstacles stand in the way of her daughter's independence, Barbara spent two years learning to train Caitlin’s first service dog, a Great Pyrenees named Badger, who assisted Caitlin with mobility tasks and pulling her wheelchair. What began as one mother's determination to empower her daughter has grown into a statewide movement. Today, Caitlin’s legacy lives on through every child who gains confidence, every family that finds hope, and every service dog team that discovers greater freedom.
Founded in 2012 and based in Lakewood, Colorado, Domino Service Dogs (DSD) is a disability-led 501(c)(3) nonprofit—run by people with disabilities for people with disabilities. We believe that financial hardship or physical limitation should never stand between a person and the life-saving partnership of a service dog.
Instead of assigning fully trained dogs from an outside agency, our evidence-based owner-train model empowers handlers to train their own canine partners using positive, reward-based methods. Under expert professional guidance over a 2-year curriculum, handlers master:
Custom Task Training: Teaching dogs specific tasks tailored to physical, psychiatric, or developmental needs (e.g., mobility support, retrieval, deep pressure therapy, alert behaviors).
Public Access Excellence: Ensuring dogs are reliable, calm, and fully obedient in complex public environments like stores, transit, and crowded events.
Handler Rights & Advocacy: Equipping handlers with complete legal knowledge regarding the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and fair housing regulations.
At DSD, training the handler is just as vital as training the dog. Living with a disability often brings social isolation. Our Lakewood facility serves as a welcoming community hub where handlers connect with peers who truly understand their journey, building a network of mutual encouragement and lasting friendships.
Through The Caitlin Tyra Brady Training Fund, we directly offset tuition costs and provide scholarships for low-income Coloradans, ensuring our programs remain reachable for those who need them most. To date, DSD has helped over 200 service dog teams across Colorado unlock new levels of autonomy, dignity, and active community participation.
When you donate to Domino Service Dogs through Colorado Gives, your gift goes directly toward scholarship assistance, task evaluations, and lifelong support for our handler teams.
Your generosity fuels the domino effect: transforming a dog into a reliable partner, empowering a handler with life-altering independence, and honoring Caitlin’s memory by keeping the doors open for families across Colorado.
Domino Service Dogs (DSD) breaks down the financial and systemic barriers to service dog ownership by empowering people with disabilities to train their own life-saving service dogs using humane, reward-based techniques.
Domino Service Dogs (DSD) is a Lakewood, Colorado-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to breaking down financial and systemic barriers to service dog ownership. Founded in honor of Caitlin Tyra Brady, whose courage and love for dogs inspired her mother, Barbara Henry, to take action, DSD was established to ensure that children and adults with disabilities have affordable access to the life-changing support of a service dog.
Traditional service dog programs often place an insurmountable burden on families, requiring years on waiting lists and costing upwards of $25,000 to $35,000. DSD addresses this gap through an innovative, evidence-based owner-trainer model that empowers individuals and families to train their own service dogs under expert professional guidance. Through a structured two-year curriculum featuring individualized instruction, group classes, public access coaching, and task evaluations, handlers learn to train their dogs for specific physical, psychiatric, or developmental tasks while mastering real-world public access skills and legal rights.
Led by professionals—many of whom share the lived experience of program participation—DSD also serves as an inclusive community hub in Lakewood that combats social isolation and builds lasting support networks for handlers. Since opening its doors, Domino Service Dogs has supported more than 200 service dog teams across Colorado, restoring independence, safety, and dignity to members of the local community.
Organization name
Domino Service Dogs
other names
DSD
2012
Tax id (EIN)
46-3426784
Category
Human Services, Public & Societal Benefit, Animal-Related
Organization Size
Medium Organization
Address
1455 Newland StMailing
PO Box 140245Jefferson County, CO, US