Refused a Service Dog After 55, She Built a Fair That Will Fill City Hall This Weekend

When Janie Heinrich went looking for a service dog after a crate fell on her and left her with an incomplete spinal cord injury, three separate organizations turned her away. The reason, she said, was her age. She was over 55, and she was told they would have to “re-home” the dog.

Eight years and 46 matched service-dog teams later, the nonprofit she founded in response will fill Pasadena City Hall on Saturday, May 2, with 79 vendor booths, a climbing wall, hand-pedaled bicycles, food trucks, an all-disabled band and a wheelchair dance team — the seventh edition of an event Heinrich named the Accessibility Resource Fair, or A.R.F., “so our dogs can say it too.”

What began as a personal workaround to age discrimination Heinrich said she had not expected to encounter has grown into a substantial annual gathering of disability resources in the San Gabriel Valley. The number of booths has more than doubled in a single year — Pasadena Now reported “more than 35” at last year’s fair — and the program now spans the region’s major rehabilitation institutions alongside specialists in Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, autism, the Deaf community, the blind community, and suicide prevention.

Heinrich, the founder and chief executive of MobilityDog, the Pasadena-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit that produces the fair, said the rejections she encountered also extended to the opposite end of adulthood. Younger applicants between 16 and 32, she said, were being denied service dogs by some organizations on the grounds that they “weren’t considered responsible enough.”

“A service dog is a lot of work, but when it works, it’s magical,” she said in an interview.

The fair, which runs from 11:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at City Hall, 100 N. Garfield Ave., is free except for food. It is the fourth consecutive year MobilityDog has held the fair at City Hall; earlier editions were held at the University Club and, briefly, online.

Three new booths this year are designed to coax visitors back into ordinary domestic life — cooking, knitting and gardening — each chosen, Heinrich said, for a specific reason. After a disability or progressive disease begins, “people stop cooking,” she said; the cooking station will demonstrate adaptive techniques, including for people with hand-dexterity issues. Knitting, she said, is “so good to strengthen their hands.” Gardening, she added, was a way of pulling people back from the withdrawal that often follows a diagnosis. “After you have something catastrophic change in your life, you kind of pull away from those pieces,” she said. “It’s just about stepping into all of life.”

That theme — re-engagement, against the gravity of isolation — runs through everything Heinrich described about MobilityDog’s work. Handlers matched with one of the organization’s dogs are folded into a community that meets the first Saturday of every month not only to train, but to eat lunch together. “A lot of times people stop eating around each other because of the changes,” Heinrich said. “Maybe they’re drooling or maybe they’re missing their mouth or maybe all these things, and they come to find out that nobody is even noticing what’s going on.”

A scholarship from Los Angeles County Supervisor Horvath, Heinrich said, paid for two recent field trips in which handlers rode local trains into downtown Los Angeles to visit the Broad museum, the Mark Taper Forum, and two restaurants. About 70 percent of the participants, she said, had not done anything of the kind since the onset of their disability.

“Isolation is worse, is more damaging, is more difficult for many of us than the diagnosis,” she said.

The fair will also feature a volunteer table addressing what Heinrich described as a coming federal requirement that some Social Security recipients perform 80 hours of volunteer work to retain their benefits, beginning in June. Heinrich said she did not have all the details of the provision at hand, and the requirement should be confirmed against current federal guidance. MobilityDog, she said, plans to host eligible seniors as volunteers at its office at the Western Justice Center, a Pasadena complex she said houses 19 nonprofits.

Vendors expected on Saturday include Easter Seals, Rancho Los Amigos Rehabilitation Center, Casa Colina, the Los Angeles County Commission on Disabilities, Pasadena commissioners, the Pasadena Village, the Pasadena Senior Center, End Overdoses, Peace Over Violence, and the League of Women Voters, which Heinrich said would staff a nonpartisan voter-information booth. Performers include the Los Angeles Rollettes, a wheelchair dance team, and Can Do Musical, a group Heinrich described as “all disabled musicians” who “perform all over the United States.”

A MobilityDog board member, Carlos Benavides — who serves as president of the Los Angeles County Commission on Disabilities and as a patient advocate at Rancho Los Amigos Rehabilitation Center — has helped popularize within the organization the term “T.A.B.,” for “temporarily able-bodied,” a phrase Heinrich traces to an unnamed advocate in the early 1970s.

“There’s two types of people in the world,” she said. “There’s people that are disabled and there’s T.A.B.’s.”

Asked what she wanted visitors to take away from Saturday’s fair, whether they stayed 10 minutes or three hours, Heinrich answered in a single sentence.

“I can live my life and my dreams.”

The seventh Accessibility Resource Fair, or A.R.F., hosted by the Pasadena nonprofit MobilityDog, takes place Saturday, May 2, from 11:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at Pasadena City Hall, 100 N. Garfield Ave., Pasadena. Admission is free; food from on-site trucks is available for purchase. Accessible parking and amenities are available on site. For more information, visit MobilityDog.org/poodlepalooza.