Erasmus+ együttműködés

Two ADI members – With Dogs for a Smile Foundation (WDSF) from Hungary and Os’Mose from Belgium – just completed a successful two-year collaboration through the Erasmus+ programme.

Erasmus+ is the European Union’s flagship programme for education, training, youth, and sport. With a budget of €26.2 billion for 2021–2027, it promotes inclusion, digital and green transitions, and active citizenship, supporting major European strategies such as the European Education Area and European Union Youth Strategy.

The collaboration focused on professional development, educational outreach, and raising awareness about the many ways assistance dogs support people with disabilities.

After more than a decade of training assistance dogs, WDSF wanted to tackle a persistent misconception — that assistance dogs only serve people with visual impairments.

“Invisible disabilities ” such as autism, panic disorder, anxiety, depression, and other psychiatric illnesses can also create even greater barriers to participating in normal life” explains Ágota Juharos, Director of WDSF. “The main goal of our application was to make as many people as possible aware of the work done by assistance dogs”.

The project aimed to train adult professionals – educators, therapists, and support workers – to better understand the vital roles assistance dogs play.

The partnership between Ágota and Vanessa Wey, Director of Os’Mose, began several years earlier, when Os’Mose helped WDSF during its Assistance Dogs International (ADI) candidacy.

“We learned so much from Vanessa back then,” says Ágota. “Our trainers visited Belgium several times, and we learned a great deal from them. It was therefore obvious that we should ask them to be our partners in our Erasmus application, and we were delighted that Vanessa accepted our invitation”

Together, they designed a project under the adult education sector, sharing expertise, organising exchange visits, and co-authoring valuable training materials.

For Vanessa, the project brought many benefits: “Thanks to our Hungarian colleagues, we reflected on and improved our work with children,” she says. “Their pedagogical approach opened new perspectives and strengthened our impact.”

Through the collaboration, Vanessa was able to analyse and reflect upon her own organisation’s internal practices. She also welcomed the opportunity to share Os’Mose’s well-established Foster Family Guide with a wider audience.

Above all, both Vanessa and Ágota are extremely happy with the practical and personal results of their collaboration. They produced practical tools which are now freely available online:

• Animal-assisted Special Lessons (ASL) manual
• A leaflet for working with foster families 
• 100 ASL lessons of teaching about responsible animal husbandry and the work of assistance dogs in Hungary 

“This project confirmed what I already believed,” says Vanessa “that collaboration, whether national or international, is one of the best ways to progress. This was not my first experience with such partnerships, but every time I realise that everyone wins — the associations, the professionals, the foster families and above all the beneficiaries”.

Ágota agrees: “The Erasmus+ grant and collaborating with Os’Mose allowed us to reach far more people than we could have alone. It helped us strengthen our volunteer training and broaden awareness about assistance dogs in Hungary.”

This collaboration between the two ADI organisations has already sparked new ideas. Inspired by WDSF’s experience, Os’Mose is now exploring the field of psychiatric assistance dogs, and WDSF is continuing to expand its foster network and is now collaborating with ADI member Service Dogs Malta Foundation through a new Erasmus+ mobility grant.

This Erasmus+ project shows that when organisations share experience and knowledge, everyone benefits, especially the people whose lives are changed by assistance dogs.

You can find the full results of the project on this website

In numbers:

• 100 ASL lessons held in Hungary
• 2,482 children and 785 adults reached
• 6,000 people attended Os’Mose presentations
• 334 new clients applied for assistance dogs
• 47 teams successfully certified

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Since 2011, Ágota Juharos has been leading the With Dogs fo a Smile Foundation with great enthusiasm and commitment, while working as the head physician of the radiology department at a military hospital. She devotes almost all of her free time to the foundation, volunteers, clients, her dogs and her wonderful team. She works with excellent young trainers.  They all strive to ensure that as many people with disabilities in Hungary as possible get to know and use highly trained assistance dogs, and that this becomes accepted and popular in her home country.

Vanessa lives in Belgium, though a piece of her heart is still in Switzerland. Her first contact with dog training was when she followed lessons with Vaya, her own beautiful Flat-Coated Retriever, in a dog school when she was just a teenager. She trained her first service dog, Alissa, as a volunteer in 2000. Vanessa moved to Switzerland two years later, where her focus was on positive training for dogs. She obtained a Federal Certificate as Dog Trainer and also continued to train and follow-up on service dogs in Belgium. When she came back to Belgium in 2010 she founded Os’mose. Os’mose trains dogs to react and work with as few commands as possible. Her organization was first accredited by ADI in 2015. Vanessa, who has been employed as director of Os’mose since 2016, is also fighting an ongoing battle for the right to access public spaces with a service dog.