The waitlist for a service dog at Canine Companions' Medford campus runs 80 to 100 people deep at any given moment, and for years the bottleneck was not dogs, trainers or money. It was beds.

That problem officially ended on September 24, when the organization cut the ribbon on the James and Gina Nazzaro Residence Hall and the Jane Nagy Kennel Wing at its Miller Family Campus on Middle Island Road. The expansion doubles the campus's dorm rooms from 11 to 22, and with them the organization's capacity to do the thing it exists to do: match expertly trained service dogs with people with disabilities, free of charge.

Why a dog charity needs a dormitory

The dorms are the part of the operation most people never see. When Canine Companions matches a dog with a person, the pair does not simply shake paws and head home. The new handler moves onto the campus for roughly two weeks of Team Training, learning the dog's dozens of commands, how to work together in stores and on sidewalks, and how to care for a working animal, with family members often staying alongside. Every room on campus is a family served; every room that does not exist is someone waiting another class cycle.

With 11 rooms, the Medford campus could graduate only about 60 teams a year across four classes. The organization expects the new hall to push that past 100, which is the difference between a waitlist measured in years and one measured in months for the region stretching from Virginia to Maine that the Medford headquarters serves.

The builder who started as a puppy raiser

The 4 million dollar project was built and donated by Jim Nazzaro, who runs the Bay Shore construction firm J. Nazzaro Partnership, and his wife Gina. The couple came to the organization the way most of its volunteers do, from the bottom of the leash: they spent a year and a half as volunteer puppy raisers, housebreaking and socializing a Labrador named Zach before handing him back for professional training. Zach was eventually matched with a young man in Maryland, and the Nazzaros were hooked.

Ground broke on the new wing in March 2025, and the finished hall opened quietly in August, in time for the Team Training class that graduated on August 13 to be the first to sleep in it. The ribbon cutting last week made it official, fountain out front and all, with the couple's name over the door of the residence hall and the new kennel wing honoring longtime supporter Jane Nagy.

A campus built for this

Canine Companions has been matching service dogs with people since 1975 and places them entirely free, a promise that holds even as raising and training a single dog costs tens of thousands of dollars. The dogs, Labrador retrievers, golden retrievers and crosses of the two, spend about 18 months with volunteer puppy raisers before returning for six to nine months of professional instruction in tasks like opening doors, retrieving dropped items, pulling manual wheelchairs and alerting deaf handlers to sounds.

The Medford property, an 11-acre campus that serves as the organization's Northeast headquarters, was already one of the best equipped of its kind, with a 49,000 square foot canine care center, 53 kennels with exercise yards, a wellness clinic, five training rooms and a community bistro with an accessible kitchen. The new residence hall fills in the piece that capped everything else.

You can go see the dogs

The campus is not a closed shop. Canine Companions runs public tours monthly and holds quarterly graduation ceremonies that are open to anyone, where each dog's volunteer puppy raiser formally hands the leash to the person the dog will serve. There is not a dry eye in the building, and with the new hall open, the ceremonies are about to get bigger.

For Long Islanders, the shorthand is this: the quiet campus in Medford where service dogs learn their jobs just doubled its ability to change somebody's life, a hundred families a year instead of sixty, because a builder from Bay Shore who once raised a puppy named Zach decided the organization should never again turn someone away for lack of a bed.