San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
THEIR DAY CARE CENTER. MEET THE DOG LOVERS WHO TOOK OVER
Co-op: Dog owners band together to save beloved day care center
In late March, the clients and staff at Every Dog Has Its Day Care in West Oakland received a shocking email: After 22 years, the business would close within a few months.
Grief ensued. Clients picked up their dogs, lamenting their broken hearts. Kelly Hall hugged Katie Wojnoonski, the company’s chief operating officer, tearfully recalling the helpfulness of the staff when her dog Lewis had a leg injury. In turn, the staff sadly anticipated the pending separation from their beloved charges. Senior dog handler Susy De Luna cried, thinking, “I’m not going to see these dogs anymore.”
And then sadness gave way to determination for Hall and other dog parents, along with Wojnoonski and Lindsey Parker, the facility’s director of operations: They weren’t ready to let the facility close. The pet owners and the workers banded together, and within about six weeks, they accomplished an astonishing feat, raising nearly $3 million to buy the business and forming a cooperative to run it, the Dog Social Club Cooperative.
The co-op model will give the center’s roughly 65 workers a voice in how the business is run and a share in any annual profit. Clients will have the option of becoming a co-op member and receiving dividends based on their usage.
The Bay Area is already home to several prominent co-op businesses, including Arizmendi Bakery, the Cheese Board Collective in Berkeley and Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco. At a time when housing and living costs have skyrocketed in the region — and as some iconic businesses have closed up shop — supporters say this type of cooperative structure could increasingly be a way to keep assets in a community.
Dog day care was such a foreign concept that people laughed at Lauren Westreich when she opened Every Dog Has Its Day Care in 1997. Its mission was to positively impact the life of every dog it came into contact with and the people who love them, she said. Now, many people opt for the service, which costs $535 per month for unlimited care, or $44 to $66 per night, to be sure their dogs get socialization and exercise while they’re away.
Located inside a 25,000-square-foot warehouse on more than an acre of land, the sheer size of the property is one reason some clients refer to it as a Disneyland for dogs. It accommodates 150 to 200 dogs daily and houses a puppy nursery and 12 indoor/outdoor play yards with retractable roofs.
Westreich said she decided to sell the property because she wanted to retire from dog day care to pursue “other adventures” and the timing felt right. After she put the building on the market for $6.75 million, the offers came in, pressuring the fledgling co-op to move quickly.
“There was a lot of interest in the building for me,” Westreich said. “The
reason that I was willing and wanted to work with the Dog Social Club is because of their commitment and the involvement of my senior staff, Katie and Lindsey. I would not be comfortable selling the business to a stranger.”
Many clients are attached to the dogcare model Westreich created. The staff separates dogs into playgroups based on size, age, energy level and temperament. For example, there are the “millers” — the senior dogs that mill around all day.
“Their yard is full of comfy beds, blankets, story time and brushing,” Wojnoonski said. “They are well loved and cared for in their senior years. We also have a handler who sings almost all day long during her shift to keep the dogs company.”
The center has accepted dogs that are hard to accommodate. Ra Criscitiello, a worker rights advocate who helped launch the cooperative, couldn’t find a place to board her late dog Banjo, a 100pound wirehaired pointer who was fearful in confined environments, making it difficult or impossible to board him. But Every Dog Has Its Day Care accepted him.
“That literally meant that we could travel, and we couldn’t before, because nowhere else would handle him,” Criscitiello said.
Peggi Winter worried about finding another facility to take care of Dillon, her 18-year-old silky terrier who is deaf and blind. Dillon spends her days with a group of small senior dogs that tend to curl up and sleep together.
“It was very distressing and disturbing because I feel like that’s why she’s lived this long — besides the fact that I take really good care of her — but I really feel it’s the connection between the other dogs,” Winter said.
It’s also the bond with the staff that has inspired such client loyalty, she said. Every Dog has a fairly intensive doghandler training program and commitment to workforce development, which Westreich described as “going out and recruiting people who maybe don’t have good access to the job market. Also, it means helping people who have either never had a job before or who may not be as easily employed as others.”
For example, senior dog handler De Luna formerly worked at a car auction and found it difficult to change careers without experience.
“They gave me this opportunity, and I had never worked with dogs before,” she said. “Within a week, I said, ‘This is for me. I’m not leaving.’ ”
The Dog Social Club Cooperative is scheduled to officially launch July 10, after the sale is scheduled to close. Instead of being another tale of a community institution going by the wayside, the cooperative provides a glimmer of hope for locals concerned about quality-of-life issues in the Bay Area, with its dog-eatdog real estate market.
Criscitiello hopes the cooperative will inspire other business owners who might be planning for retirement to consider this corporate structure.
“It’s exciting to think that it could be potentially a model,” Criscitiello said. “There is a lot of wealth here, and there are also a lot of people who are interested in not just making more and more money but helping keep economies local.”
“Their yard is full of comfy beds, blankets, story time and brushing. They are well loved and cared for in their senior years. We also have a handler who sings almost all day long during her shift to keep the dogs company.” Katie Wojnoonski, chief operating officer of Every Dog Has Its Day Care in West Oakland