Listen to the interview here!
Dylan Heckart
Toni Reece: Hi there. This is Toni Reece. Welcome to the Get Inspired! Project for Berks County Living Magazine. Today I am with Dylan Heckart. Dylan, welcome to the Get Inspired! Project.
Dylan Heckart: Thank you, Toni. It’s great to be here.
Toni: Dylan, tell me a little bit about yourself.
Dylan: I am the Director of Communications for the Humane Society of Berks County and also the Humane Society of Lebanon County. I’ve worked in various positions for the Humane Society for eight years now. I absolutely love my work.
On the other side, I’m a new father. My son is about to turn 2. My wife, Laura, and I live in Sinking Spring. We’ve lived all over the county. We’re both transplants to Berks County. I’ve lived here most of my life, and she moved here when she was very young. She’s a teacher, and is currently the Director of the Albright Early Learning Center. We like to think of ourselves as pretty involved in our community. It’s a real pleasure to watch Berks County and Reading evolve.
Toni: And it’s only going to get better, right?
Dylan: Exactly. As we were talking about earlier, I think we’re at a turning point.
Toni: I do, too. Let’s go into the Project. What does inspiration mean to you?
Dylan: I think that when people think about inspiration and leadership, they think of a leader – someone who is actively helping other people to reach their potential or to accomplish a task. I think what really inspires me are not only people who can help other people to realize a joint vision, but people who have the foresight and the true inspiration to look at a problem and not just say, “We have a better way to solve this problem,” but to look at it and say, “You know what, we don’t actually have to face this problem at all. We can actually solve this and never have to deal with it again.”
Working with the Humane Society and people who are dealing with issues of poverty and their animals, they’re often coming to us when there’s a problem. What we realized was, we were just a clearinghouse for these animals and the people who loved them, and we were handling their individual problems, but we were seeing the same stories over and over and over again. We took a step back and we said, “How can we actually solve these problems on a larger scale?”
I think in a nutshell, that’s inspiration for me. It’s being able to look at that problem and say, “We don’t have to deal with this at all, actually.”
Toni: So you’re inspired when it isn’t just a problem that continues to be there over and over again, but it doesn’t become a problem anymore. You’re inspired by the action that you take to get rid of that problem.
Dylan: Absolutely. Anyone can look at an issue and say, “This is our plan of attack. This is the way we’re going to solve this individual problem. True inspiration comes in when you’re looking two, three, four years down the road and you’re saying, “In a couple of years, we want to eradicate this. We want to solve this instead of simply responding to it.”
Toni: So the inspiration almost sounds like a desire and a willingness to make a change.
Dylan: I think if you don’t have a desire and a willingness to make a change, you haven’t been paying attention for the past decade or so.
Toni: Right. You haven’t been inspired by what’s happening around you to make a change.
Dylan: Absolutely.
Toni: You’ve given an example with the work that you do, but how do you put that type of willingness and desire for change into practice here in Berks County? Can you give me an example of a time when you were inspired by a potential problem and put something into place in order to eradicate it?
Dylan: Sure. The best example that I can give you from our work with the Humane Society is we deal with recurring outbreaks of disease in the animal population in Berks County at large, and in the City of Reading especially because it’s a tight population center. We were seeing in particular this disease canine parvovirus, which is very, very difficult to treat once the animal shows symptoms and is often fatal. It’s a problem obviously for the animal, but it’s a significant problem for the family as well. It can be expensive to treat. They’re often faced with a very difficult choice. Do they put the animal down? Do they surrender the animal to the Humane Society? Or do they invest some of their already limited resources in treating this disease?
What we did was we tracked where these folks were coming from. We basically mapped their home address, and we found where the animals were living, where the animals were becoming infected. We took our vet mobile, our mobile platform out, and performed low cost clinics. We vaccinated as many dogs as we could in that particular area that we identified as an epicenter. Over the course of several years of this, we’ve seen the incidents of canine parvovirus decrease drastically.
Will we ever completely eradicate it? No. But that’s a particular instance where I think we looked at the long view and we said, “We need to stop responding to this, because we’re not fixing this problem. Even if we treated every animal and we treated them successfully, we’re still not solving the original problem.”
That’s a small piece of the puzzle, but it’s emblematic of our greater efforts to address the issues that are facing animals in our community and the people who love them, who frequently are strapped for resources. You can't tell me that anyone listening is better off than they were five years ago for sure, and unfortunately in the poorest parts of our community, it’s exponentially worse.
Toni: So not only are you attempting to maintain and getting close to eradicating this issue for dogs, but you also provided help and support to low income families with probably some other problems that were going on as well. That inspiration to do something different probably goes a lot further than that vaccine, I would imagine.
Dylan: Oh, absolutely. It’s part of a bigger initiative. It ties in with another program that we have. We call it Ani-Meals on Wheels. We’re big on cute puns. We developed this with the Berks County Office of Aging and some other family services groups to provide pet food to low income, fixed income families – senior citizens, disabled persons, and eventually just expanded the program to anyone who would ask, because we figured if you’re willing to tell us that you need help with pet food, it’s entirely likely that you do, too.
Those programs, they also tie into our greater goal, which is to enhance the overall awareness of the importance of companion animals in people’s lives and things like veterinary care, which may not even really be on the radar for some of our clients.
Toni: Let’s go back to you. Who in Berks County inspires you?
Dylan: There are so many. Should I name names?
Toni: If you’d like to.
Dylan: Actually, someone keeps leaping to mind, and he’ll kill me for this, but a friend of mine, Chris Daubert. He’s a fresh face on Reading City Council. I believe he teaches eighth grade at Wilson. He just has some great ideas and a real drive for improving the lives of people in Reading and for turning around this fiscal and social crisis that it seems we never really step out of. It’s this constant cycle.
Chris isn’t the only one. There are so many people out there. My teachers growing up, some of whom are still working – not that I’m that old, but it’s amazing that after teaching me for one year or several years that you wouldn’t just throw in the towel. A lot of the folks who are working in public safety at the state level and at the local level. People in local government are just as strapped for cash sometimes as the individual clients that we deal with, who are just doing their best every day to make it work. That’s inspiring.
The idea that you may in fact be unable to do your job the way that you wanted to because of factors beyond your control, but you still get up in the morning, you put those boots on, you start the car, and you go in. By the end of the day, you’ve handled problems in a new and completely different way than maybe you ever really would have. Some of these people – my hats off to them.
Toni: That goes to the very first question, doesn’t it, which is, what inspires you, and what inspires you is that action and that desire to make change; that’s why someone in these examples of people that inspire you, it makes perfect sense that they would inspire you based on your definition of the word.
Dylan: Absolutely. I think I may have said something similar. Anyone can address a clearly defined issue, and essentially anyone can solve a problem if it’s placed in front of them if it’s a short term issue. Anybody can do a job if it’s easy, but when it’s the Sisyphean task and you’ve just got to roll that boulder up and you know it’s going to come down sometime, and you go back down and you roll it back up, there’s something extremely inspiring about that.
Toni: I agree with you. What do you want your legacy to be?
Dylan: It’s very simple. My first legacy, I certainly hope, is my love for my family, and I hope that my son grows up in a world that is fairly similar to mine, but better. I hope simply that I am able to leave my immediate community in Berks, and who knows, maybe a larger community, better than I found it. I guess my legacy would be good stewardship. That’s what I’m hoping for.
Toni: I love that. Dylan, thank you so much for being part of the Get Inspired! Project.
Dylan: Thank you, Toni. I really appreciate it.
