Helping veterans and the community feel seen, heard and safe

Whether serving as interim executive director of St. Cloud State University’s Veterans Resource Center or running Dogs for Defense with her husband, Kristin Hughes is always looking to make people feel safe and connected.

Kristin and Dan Hughes started Dogs for Defense in 2007. The idea for the business started when the couple lived in New Jersey in the early 2000s. Kristin Hughes taught elementary school while Dan Hughes was a United States Secret Service special agent based out of New York City. Following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center — which Dan witnessed and responded to, receiving a U.S. Secret Service Medal of Valor for his actions — Dan realized there was a serious shortage of K-9s available for event detection and other security needs. He started training the couple’s German shepherd, Oakley, to be an explosive-detecting dog after noticing her working dog characteristics. After facing some bureaucratic hurdles to get Oakley working on the East Coast, the couple moved their burgeoning family back to North Dakota so Dan and Oakley could work with a police department there, before eventually starting Dogs for Defense.

In the business’s early days, Dan spent his time overseas — largely in Afghanistan — while Kristin managed the business from home in the States. When the couple decided to focus Dogs for Defense on the U.S. domestically, they relocated to St. Cloud around 2012. Holding ATF and DEA licenses, the business signed a number of military and government contracts to do detection work, including explosive detection and narcotics detection. Their work was focused on military bases as well as community and large-scale events. With most events coming to a halt in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic, business slowed. Kristin, who at that time had been a stay-at-home mother with the couple’s five children, started looking for work to supplement some of the lost income.

She joined SCSU as an office administrator for the Veterans Resource Center in 2023, before being named interim director of the Center in 2024.

“I feel like I should be here, and so I'm doing all I can while I am here. It kind of tugs at the heart; it's just such an amazing job,” she said. “I get to serve people all day. I get to problem solve. I get to give them resources. It's pretty amazing, and the fact that I didn't ask for it… this is where God wanted me to be.”

Hughes enjoys the community connections she has made through her role with the Center, including meeting with the Beyond the Yellow Ribbon organization monthly.

“The veterans community in St. Cloud is amazing,” she said. “They accepted me right away.”

Hughes hopes that, through her role with the Veterans Resource Center, she can help provide a space for students as well as fellow veterans who are faculty, staff or alumni to feel connection.

“I just want them to know that there's somewhere to go, that somebody else is working in their favor, that they have an advocate, and that they don't have to do it alone,” she said. “They're seen, and there are people here who understand what sacrifices you have made, and that it can be a challenge to start something new like this. You are not alone.”

While neither Kristin nor Dan Hughes are veterans themselves, they have a long line of veterans on both sides of their family. Everyone they employ through Dogs for Defense are either military or law enforcement veterans.

While not yet at the level it was pre-pandemic, the Hughes have steadily built their Dogs for Defense business back up. They do a significant amount of work at Fort McCoy in Wisconsin, have had contracts with Sea World and Valleyfair, and provide services for a number of different events and businesses in the Midwest as well as through their contractors in Virginia, Florida, Texas and California. Dan handles training and working with the dogs as CEO, while Kristin handles the accounting side and other business aspects as owner and president of Dogs for Defense. The couple currently have five dogs at home, two of whom are in training. They now have a bedbug-detecting dog as well. The Hughes have used different types of dogs over the years, from German shepherds and Belgian Malinois to yellow labs and rescue dogs.

“Our dogs — even with our handlers —all the dogs are family dogs. Our dogs do not have training on bite work. That is something that we provide as a kind of perk to a client, because we're not a security company. For example, if we're using the narcotic detection dog and that dog were to indicate, we don't call the police. Clients decide what they’re going to do with that. We can dispose of it because we have a DEA license, but we are not the ones to call law enforcement,” Kristin Hughes said. “If there was an indicator of some sort of explosive, same thing. Clients are the ones getting law enforcement involved. Yes, we will help you with the process, but we are not the security company. We do not do any tracking. We do not do any bite work. Our dogs are all friendly; they can be in crowds and be petted. That's a big part of it, is the community relations.

“The dogs are part of the family. And yes, our house is crazy. Expect nothing less.”

Taking care of the dogs is a family affair in the Hughes household. Their children help feed and walk the dogs on the family’s acreage, and each of the dogs have a crate in the children’s rooms and sleep in with them.

The dogs are not forced to work. Miller, the couple’s yellow lab who is an explosive detection dog, is likely to be the next dog to “retire” to being solely a family dog.

“We want the dogs to work because they want to work. Miller’s starting to show signs that he would rather be at home with the kids. It's not fair for him if he doesn't want to work as often,” Hughes said. “He gets excited to work still, but not like the shepherd that my husband works. So that's why there's one in training, because we want the dogs to be happy, too.”

While her life looks different than what she pictured out of college, Hughes wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Never did I know that we were going to have a houseful. I have a best friend I went to college with who I knew when I was little. She's like, ‘I cannot believe that you live like this. I would never have thought you would be okay with dog hair and slobber everywhere. This is not you,’” Hughes said. “Well, it is now. It's embedded in my blood, like literally there is probably dog hair in my blood. But it works, and it’s the best.”