Guiding Eyes Outreach Center Grand Opening

On Saturday November 13, 2021, we proudly celebrated the public Grand Opening of the new Guiding Eyes for the Blind Outreach Center. Located on Commerce Street in Yorktown Heights, NY, just a few miles from our 10-acre Granite Springs Road campus, this new facility will allow our organization to better connect with the community in which we began.

This beautiful and accessible facility will serve as an information center for the Yorktown community, to learn about Guiding Eyes’ programs and volunteer opportunities. Our students in training will be able to utilize the space when they are downtown and it will also provide an area to hold dog training classes, informational demonstrations, and a meeting space for local civic organizations. There’s even a gift shop where supporters of our mission can purchase fun and interesting Guiding Eyes merchandise. While our Headquarters and Training School has been a fixture in Yorktown for over 64 years, this new location in the village will allow for a more public presence, to further our involvement with the town’s many civic groups and to engage with the Yorktown community.

It was a successful Grand Opening event, with a constant flow of visitors, enthusiastically asking questions about our mission, our guide dogs, and opportunities for volunteering. Our current volunteers, always eager to help, manned the Gift Shop and answered questions throughout the day. A Brood/Stud Foster brought in her breeding dogs to welcome the public, while released dogs, yellow Lab Maggie and German Shepherd Hydrus who have found their calling as delightful ambassadors, welcomed visitors as the they came in.

Local station, News12 Westchester, covered the Grand Opening and interviewed our own Rebekah Cross, Donor Relations Officer and Guiding Eyes graduate. Rebekah appeared with her black Lab guide dog Regal and shared her story of vision loss and her connection to the organization. You can access the News12 video segment here.