Helping Hands

Helping hands

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Helping Hands: Monkey Helpers for the Disabled is a national nonprofit serving quadriplegic and other people with severe spinal cord injuries or mobility-impairments byproviding highly trained monkeys to assist with daily activities.
We raise and train these monkeys to act as live-in companions who, over the course of 20-30 years, will provide the gifts ofindependence, companionship, dignity and hope to the people they help.
Helping Hands also educates thousands of young people annually through the Spinal Cord Injury Prevention Program (SCIPP). SCIPP teachespreventive measures for safety awareness, heightens sensitivity to the challenges of being disabled, and promotes understanding of the human-animal bond.
Through the generous support of donors andvolunteers - just like you - our monkeys are placed at no cost with disabled people and their families.
Helping Hands trained and placed the first monkey as a helper and a companion to a paralyzedindividual in 1979. In 1982, Helping Hands became a 501(c)(3) corporation under the IRS code. From the beginning, Helping Hands' mission has been to provide assistance to people with the greatest needs:people who have become quadriplegic (paralyzed from the neck down) as a result of an accident, injury, or disease.
In the early years, Helping Hands received major developmental support from the NationalScience Foundation, the Veterans Administration, and from the Paralyzed Veterans of America. There was interest in investigating innovative ways to support veterans who had received severe spinal cordinjuries while performing military service.
During the research and development stage, Helping Hands investigated and solidified all of the components of the program - from determining which speciesof monkey was best suited to the kinds of tasks the human recipients would need, to working out a method how to teach them their tasks.
Once these parameters were in places, Helping Hands was able...