ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Outdoor Power Equipment Institute President Kris Kiser and a rescue dog known as Lucky the TurfMutt will appear on the Lucky Dog television show for a third season. The show airs on Saturday mornings as part of the “CBS Dream Team, It’s Epic” block of programming and is produced by Litton Entertainment. Lucky Dog’s new fourth season will air in 2018.
Lucky is the real-life rescue dog behind the animated superhero, TurfMutt. TurfMutt.com’s environmental education and stewardship program educates children in grades K-5, their families and their community leaders on the importance of caring for green spaces. OPEI’s Education and Research Foundation serves as the creative force behind TurfMutt.
“The TurfMutt program has reached more than 68 million children, educators and families since 2009, showing them how they can ‘save the planet, one yard at a time,’” Kiser says. “The Lucky Dog show has helped us inspire new audiences with the TurfMutt message: that green space is vital to the health of our families and communities.”
In the last season of Lucky Dog, OPEI’s Kiser along with Gothic Landscaping helped to re-establish living landscapes for three homeowners. Lucky Dog also pairs an adopted rescue dog with a deserving family. The new episodes of Lucky Dog will discuss ways to steward the environment through family yards, which are extensions of home living spaces, Kiser says.
Additionally, TurfMutt was recently named an official education partner of the U.S. Green Building Council’s Learning Lab. Lucky the TurfMutt will also be featured in an upcoming book titled Best Friends, which will be published in 2018 by National Geographic and written by Rebecca Ascher-Walsh.
As part of the youth program’s outreach, each year TurfMutt hosts the “Be a Backyard Superhero” contest to inspire children to visualize how their actions can help the environment. This year, the contest winner was Marissa Weber, a student in fifth grade at Guardian Angels Catholic School in Clearwater, Florida. Her school received a $10,000 grant to be used for an environmental education project on the school grounds. Weber’s teacher, Sandra Hoolihan, received the first National TurfMutt Teacher Award and a trip to Los Angeles to attend the National Science Teachers Association meeting in March 2017. Since 2010, the TurfMutt program has awarded $45,000 to schools across the country.