We're an independent nonprofit measuring something people feel but almost never test: how animal-assisted therapy affects stress and wellbeing at work.
We build careful, validated ways to measure how animal-assisted therapy affects stress and wellbeing at work — and we do the research to back it up. We keep our methods transparent, our practice ethical, and our results out in the open for anyone to check.
People have used animal-assisted therapy in clinics for years, but almost nobody has studied what it does at work — where most of us spend our days. That's the gap we started WWRI to close: giving employers, clinicians, and researchers a credible way to measure what actually happens when animals are around at work.
We build and test careful tools for measuring workplace wellbeing, so results from one place can actually be compared to another. Without a shared way to measure, every study just stands on its own — and we want ours to add up to something bigger.
We study animal-assisted therapy using real, repeatable methods — the kind other researchers can check and run again. Every study is designed to hold up when people look closely.
We write down exactly how we did things and share what we find, so anyone can build on it. Being open isn't a nice extra to us — it's how research actually earns trust.
It's short and validated, and every response adds real weight to the evidence for animal-assisted therapy at work.
People describe a shift when a friendly animal is in the room — almost no one measures whether it's there. That's the part we take seriously: bringing real rigor to what happens when animals are around at work.
So far we've brought a therapy dog into real Illinois workplaces — Keller-Heartt Oil Co., a family-owned Chicago distributor around since 1929, and Spring Orthodontics — and watched people light up between tasks. These little everyday moments are exactly what we built our tools to measure.
