About Kimberly Jo DeVault
What started as a love for animals evolved over decades of her career.
Coming Full-Circle
Kimberly Jo DeVault’s work has always centered on helping people see individuals more clearly, understand what they are experiencing, and build stronger relationships as a result.
Kimberly brings a unique blend of experience in education, organizational development, leadership coaching, and human-centered transformation. Her career spans animal welfare, where she developed innovative educational programs and community initiatives, to corporate environments, where she coached leaders, empowered teams, and guided organizations through complex change.
Throughout her career, a common thread has defined her work: helping people better understand themselves and others, navigate challenges, build stronger relationships, and thrive. Today, she brings that same passion for learning, empathy, and meaningful connection to The Honored Dog, helping people better understand the individual dogs who share their lives.
After 20 years coaching and inspiring leaders and teams as an Agile Coach, and corporate trainer, Kimberly founded The Honored Dog™ and Westie Wear® custom dog sweaters.
This focus ties back to her professional beginnings in the late 90’s. At that time, Kimberly worked for the Arizona Humane Society, one of the largest privately funded animal shelters in the country. She began working in Intake and Receiving, where she interacted firsthand with thousands of animals entering into the shelter system. During a period of severe pet overpopulation in the Phoenix area, that experience exposed her to both the resilience of companion animals and the complicated human circumstances that shape their lives.
Within a few months she moved on to become the Educational Coordinator, developing, designing, and facilitating humane-education programs for children and adults. Her work focused on building empathy, responsible pet stewardship, and a deeper understanding of the relationship between people and animals. One of her most recognized accomplishments was the creation of Animals Across the Curriculum, a four-week program designed and delivered in schools across Maricopa County. Additionally, Kimberly’s work was adopted into Arizona’s Statewide Reading Program.
Many aspects of this work reflected in what she is doing today with The Honored Dog and Westie Wear®.
The Honored Dog is where Kimberly’s education, professional experience, animal-welfare background,
and lifelong love of dogs come together.
Because the relationship you have with your dog
is worth understanding—and worth honoring.
1998-2001
Humane Education at The Arizona Humane Society
While working at The Arizona Humane Society, she developed a comprehensive program called Animals Across the Curriculum, which integrated humane education and animal-welfare concepts into traditional classroom learning.
In 2001, Kimberly championed AHS’s contribution to Arizona’s statewide Reading Program, creating and contributing humane-education lessons, activities, and literature resources for use in libraries throughout the state. It marked the first time AHS had been invited to contribute its humane-education lessons to a statewide curriculum, and the Arizona Reads Coordinator specifically credited Kimberly with “making the collaboration happen.”
That experience established a belief that continues to shape her work today: lasting change in animal welfare is founded in our ability to understand, empathize, and connect with the animals in our lives.
2007-2026
20 Years Championing & Facilitating Change
After several years at The Arizona Humane Society, Kimberly dedicated 20 years coaching individuals, teams, and leaders through change. As an Agile Coach, facilitator, instructional designer, and educator, she created and delivered transformational learning experiences, coached leaders through complex organizational change, strengthened collaboration, and championed more humane and sustainable ways of working.
Throughout her career, Kimberly’s focus and approach has been human-centered: instilling the importance of authenticity, transparency, and trust in the workplace. Over the years, Kimberly became skilled at creating psychological safety, facilitating candid conversations, recognizing patterns within relationships and systems, and championing Agile ways of working for hundreds of individuals across several.
Kimberly studied developmental psychology and child development before earning her Master’s Degree in Journalism from the University of Arizona. She later continued her professional development through the Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching (IPEC) where she received certification in Energy Leadership coaching. Her educational and professional background brings together developmental psychology, communication, adult learning, instructional design, coaching, facilitation, humane education, and animal welfare.
Facilitation & Real-World Experience in the Human-Animal Bond
Kimberly brings a distinctive combination of animal-welfare experience, developmental psychology, child development, education, coaching, and facilitation to her work with the human-animal bond.
As Education Coordinator at the Arizona Humane Society, she created and delivered interactive humane-education programs for children and adults while working directly within one of the nation’s largest privately funded shelter systems. That experience gave her firsthand insight into how empathy, expectations, communication, learning, and human behavior influence the relationships people form with companion animals—and how greater understanding can change the way those relationships are experienced.
Facilitating Interactive, Discovery-Based Learning
Kimberly designs learning experiences in which participants are active contributors rather than passive recipients of information. Drawing heavily on Training from the Back of the Room principles and nearly two decades of facilitation and instructional-design experience, she uses conversation, reflection, collaboration, movement, storytelling, and practical application to help participants discover meaning for themselves. Her workshops are designed not simply to teach concepts, but to create moments of recognition that participants can carry back into everyday life with their dogs.
Coming Together as The Honored Dog
Today, Kimberly’s career converges into The Honored Dog™.
The Honored Dog began with Kimberly’s own dogs—Murphy, Josie, Fergie, and Dudley, four West Highland Terriers she has raised since 2005. While all four dogs were West Highland Terriers, each had an unmistakably different personality and way of moving through the world.
What began as an observation about those differences grew into a larger idea: when people have language for who their dog is, they begin to see the relationship differently.
Through The Honored Dog, Kimberly creates guided experiences that help people discover, understand, and celebrate the dog in front of them. Rather than simply providing more information, her workshops and one-on-one sessions create the space, structure, and conversation that help people make sense of their own experience, reflect on what they are seeing, and uncover insights they may not have recognized on their own.
One of Kimberly’s top CliftonStrengths is Individualization—the instinct to notice and appreciate what makes each individual distinctly themselves.
The parallel to The Honored Dog is not accidental.
Whether Kimberly is helping a corporate team understand its dynamics or helping someone understand the dog sharing their home, the foundational skill is remarkably similar: seeing the individual clearly and giving people language for what they are experiencing.