Story and Photos Provided by Candice Eaton
At the end of a long day on Safari, participants sit down to watch the sunset and discuss the day. That is what Amy Cubillas, the Director of The Sanctuary Project envisioned when she planned the sunset fundraising event to introduce Zach Skow and the Pawsitive Change Project to the Tucson Community. For two evenings, we heard about the unique project by the organization Marley’s Mutts that is changing the lives of pets and incarcerated people in California.
In 2008, Zach Skow, the Founder of Marley’s Mutts, was diagnosed with end-stage liver failure due to drug and alcohol abuse. He was accepted into a transplant program on the condition that he could maintain sobriety for six months. To do so, he was sent home to wait out his 6-months, where he would receive no palliative treatments.
During his time at home, he started walking his dogs up and down the driveway, then as he grew stronger, he began volunteering to walk dogs at the local shelter. In that time, he experienced the unconditional love and acceptance that dogs give us. They don’t care if we are sick or well, rich or poor, addicted or not; they only see us through the eyes of love. At his six-month check, his doctor informed him that even though he was still in liver failure, he no longer needed a transplant. He had managed to heal himself to the point where he could live without the surgery. He knew, without question, it was the dogs.
In 2017, after 25 years in prison on a life sentence, Brian James watched Zach walk into Corcoran State Prison with a dog. He signed up for “the dog program,” hoping to get accepted and a chance to pet and love on a dog for the first time in his adult life. He was accepted into the program and trained one of the first cohorts of dogs in the Pawsitive Change program at that facility. Brian became a model inmate after his experience in the Pawsitive Change program. He was eventually sent to a lower security facility where he earned his GED and two certificates.
Four years later, Brian had his sentencing reviewed and got the chance to appear in front of a parole board. He told his story and answered all of their questions. Afterward, the head of the parole board told him that this was the easiest decision they had ever made, and he was granted parole. They asked Brian what changed the trajectory of his life, and Brian answered, “It was the dog program.”
When Zach started Marley’s Mutts he was pulling as many dogs as he could handle from local shelters. Eventually, he expanded to moving dogs from high-density, high-kill areas to areas where shelters weren’t overflowing. Then, he started training shelter dogs as therapy animals. But he always felt like he needed to do more. No matter what he did, he couldn’t put a dent in the shelter population by pulling one dog at a time.
One day, he looked at Tehachapi State Prison from his front porch and wondered how to get more fosters to save more dogs. Then he asked, what if he could get inmates to foster dogs? That’s when he got the idea for Pawsitive Change. He was limited by the number of fosters he could recruit, but if he could work with the prisons, he could expand his foster network, save more dogs, and help an overlooked and underserved population of humans simultaneously.
The event, sponsored by Carrie Click and the Click Family Foundation, kicked off as the sun set on the patio at Tanque Verde Ranch. Steve Kozachick played guitar in the background, and attendees mingled over cocktails and small bites. Zach, Brian, and Cora Rose, the two-legged Mutt Ambassador for Marley’s Mutts hitched a ride while Brian mingled with the attendees.
All circulated skillfully amongst the attendees, shaking hands and, in Cora’s case, sniffing and scanning friendly faces for someone who would share their munchies. All three, but most notably Cora, made fast friends with everyone they met.
Later, Zach talked about how the Pawsitive Change Project was born and its benefits to Communities, from saving animals on the euthanasia list to reducing the recidivism rate for program grads. After 8 years of running the program, Zach has yet to have one graduate return to prison after their release.
A decrease in prison violence is another positive side effect of the program. Having been deployed in several facilities in California, including Corcoran State Prison, the most violent facility in the state, the Pawsitive Change Project has resulted in a decrease in violence overall. Brian told the group a story of a time when a fight broke out in the facility he was in. The “rule” was that when a fight broke out, everyone was to turn to the nearest person and start fighting until the guards subdued everyone. However, on this day, instead of following the rule, everyone, even inmates who weren’t in the Pawsitive Change program, laid down as instructed and waited for the fight to be broken up. A whole population of inmates at the most violent prison in CA suddenly chose not to fight because if they did, the dog program would be eliminated. Once again, it was the dogs.
Brian left prison in 2022 after being incarcerated since he turned 18. Many previously incarcerated people exit prison into a world where they have nowhere to go, little to their name, and find it hard, if not impossible, to get a job. But not Brian. When he was released, he had a support system of other Pawsitive Change grads who had secured a place for him to live and a job at a local boarding and training facility. He said, “Now, I can never see myself doing something that would get me sent back there.”
Soon, with the support of AZ Senator John Kavanaugh, we will see the Pawsitive Change Project implemented in Maricopa County and southern AZ by mid-2025. The program will pull eight to ten high-risk pets from a local shelter to be fostered and trained by inmates every 3 months. However, Zach still feels more is needed to alleviate overcrowding in local shelters. He wants to pilot a modified program in Southern AZ that supports housing dozens of animals in a board-and-train style facility. This would allow local shelters to reduce their census and provide inmates with new skills by training dogs and operating the facility.
Participating inmates are selected via an application process that excludes only those who have a history of animal abuse or sexual violence. Those selected learn to train the dogs based on the K9 good citizen curriculum and must remain sober and attend meetings and classes for sober living. Inmates work in teams to care for and train their dogs, including crate training. Once in the program, inmates become “dog handlers” or “trainers,” giving them a new sense of personhood and self-respect. “I had never had any other titles given to me other than lost cause, throwaway, juvenile offender, gangster felon, convicted, lifer, worst of the worst. . . having people refer to me as a dog trainer or a dog handler, that started to change my own perspective and view of myself, even my own internal dialogue,” Brian says in his book From Life sentence to New Beginning: The Most Transformative Three Months of My Life.
Soon, Zach will be traveling back and forth between Arizona and California to set up the new arm of the program here. He’ll connect with local rescues, train trainers, and raise money to cover the $18,000 for each of the first cohorts. Only then can he turn his sights to Southern Arizona to bring the program and his new pilot here.
He’s got his work cut out for him, that’s for sure, but he’s excited about this new chapter of harnessing the human-animal bond to improve the lives of pets and people in Tucson and beyond.
To learn more about the Pawsitive Change program please contact: pawsitivechangeprogram@
