Managing Horses, People, and Dreams

Maintaining a meaningful and growing riding program requires more than solid equine management. It requires dealing with humans in a way that encourages them to learn, grow, and participate without hurting the program.Failing to do so will lead to the collapse of the best intended programs.

The toddler believes that everything in life revolves around them.  The preschooler believes that everything that he wants should be provided to him. The teenager believes that he knows more than the adults around them. The young adult believes that life is fundamentally fair. The young professional believes that the solution to problems is found in proper planning and protocol development. 

Some reach wisdom at a young age. For others, wisdom takes root about the same age that arthritis begins to take hold. Wisdom evades the vast majority of people and would do so even if those people could live to be a hundred years old.

Lincoln once observed that some people claim to be able to control events but that he freely admitted that he was controlled by events. Lincoln carefully planned, and spent his adult life developing, his values.  He wasted not a moment of his time developing the minutiae of how such values  were to be put into action. He was governed by his values, not by a set of social expectations. (Though likely an exaggeration, he said that he never combed his hair but simply ran his fingers though his coarse mane to push it into rough shape. With few exceptions, very few great men displayed well coiffed hair. In fact, Grant's moral superiority over Lee is readily apparent simply from examining how much time Lee put into looking superior.)

The first step in achieving any useful degree of wisdom is in understanding both the importance of reality and the absolute insignificance of appearances. 

A business model is of no use to one seeking to have a program with values in line with ours. We are not a business. Making a profit is not even a remote consideration for us.  We have over sixty horses who consume 10-14 thousand pounds of hay a week. Our monthly feed bill is generally around five thousand dollars. We breed, conserve and promote several strains of Colonial Spanish horses and other heritage livestock. Prior to the virus we provided weekly programming for patients in the local Veteran's Hospital's PTSD prgram and had done so for seven years--at no cost to participants. We teach kids to learn to play a range of historic musical instruments with weekly sessions learning Americana, roots, blues, gospel, bluegrass and old time music--at no charge to participants. We practice and teach microbial pasture development, soil and water conservation and wild life habitat enhancement. We use horses to help severely traumatized people claw their way out of Hell.

And we do all of this with absolutely no paid staff. Everything that is done is done by volunteers.

This program depends on a human resources management system that is not easy for a casual viewer of our program to understand.Program management depends on helping every participant  grow to understand that they are part of something that matters, something that is a powerful vehicle to help horse and people. 

We have a set of rules, but we are a set of values. 

We have teenagers who are proud to have the opportunity to help new riders tack up in 90 degree heat. 

That is what we have to offer--a chance to work very hard, with no material compensation, with the goal of improving the lives of others.