Animal Assisted Happiness (AAH) was inspired by our first smile in 2006 when our family’s mini horse, Lollipop, went to see a girl named Riley who was homebound due to brain cancer – she was our first smile and is our Angel. AAH’s mission is to enrich the lives of youth with needs through barnyard animal interactions at our AAH Smile Farm and mobile visits, creating moments of joy and happiness throughout our AAH community. Founded in 2009, we serve youth with needs – a very large and unfortunately growing umbrella – medically fragile, developmental disabilities, foster youth, economically disadvantaged plus. Our vision is 1 million smiles and to date we’ve created over 102,000. We now have over 8,000 registered volunteers (2,000 active) who have helped us provide over 4000 visits for youth with needs for families and with our 300+ partner organizations across the Silicon Valley. 62% of these volunteers are youth themselves; 6th – 12th graders who have truly benefited from our AAH Smile Farm, particularly during the pandemic. Thanks to your support we are able to continue to offer private and Vocational Education visits at the AAH Smile Farm, plus our Mobile Barnyard Buddies van is out and about around the Silicon Valley visiting classrooms, pediatric hospitals and organizations that serve the youth we serve. Your donation will specifically support a Mobile Barnyard Buddy visit to Greendell Elementary School in the PAUSD where we visit the Special Education classroom with our rabbits, guinea pigs, chickens and even a mini goat for about an hour monthly so that the students can experience the smiles only animals can bring. We’ve been visiting Greendell for more than 10 years.
