Grant helps Monroe County fox therapy program support children

A $5,000 grant from the Ocean Reef Community Foundation is keeping rescued foxes in the therapy room with Monroe County children, funding visits, art sessions and other enrichment through Pawsitive Beginnings and the Florida Keys Children’s Shelter.

The award supports an unusual local partnership that blends animal welfare with child care. Pawsitive Beginnings says its foxes, rescued from the fur trade, are used in animal-assisted therapy for at-risk youth and adults recovering from trauma. Through its work with the shelter, the sanctuary brings the animals into healing-focused programming designed to help children express emotions, build resilience and feel connected.

Florida Keys Children’s Shelter says it has helped children and families since 1985 and that its services are free. The shelter says it is Monroe County’s only licensed emergency shelter for youth, serving children from birth through age 18 in a 19-bed Upper Keys facility and two group homes in Key West. The grant will help sustain hands-on services for children already living through difficult circumstances, not a distant program built around paperwork or abstract outreach.

Nicole Navarro began her fox rescue work in 2018 while volunteering at the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office Animal Farm in Key West. Pawsitive Beginnings launched in March 2020, and the sanctuary has built its identity around that origin story, starting with two rescued foxes and expanding into a therapeutic model that now reaches children in the Keys. The Ocean Reef Community Foundation’s support marks the second consecutive year it has backed the work.

The money is modest next to county budgets or major capital projects, but its impact is immediate. Ocean Reef Community Foundation says it has distributed more than $85.8 million to charity partners since 2008, and Pawsitive Beginnings has used earlier support to deepen its therapeutic footprint, including the Human-Animal Alliance Healing Den in Key Largo, opened in 2024 with a $10,000 grant. In 2023, the sanctuary was already extending fox-assisted healing work to another local trauma-focused partner, Kinder in the Keys, showing that the program has become part of a broader network of care in Monroe County.

For children moving through the shelter system, that means more than a special visit. It keeps a rare kind of local service in place, one built on rescued animals, repeated contact and a setting that exists nowhere else in the Keys.