Hello, my name is Marjorie Youngs. I’m the Executive Director of the Blue Ridge Center for Therapeutic Horsemanship here in Clarke County. Blue Ridge Center for Therapeutic Horsemanship or BRCTH for short, we’re a non-profit organization. We serve students with disabling conditions, adults and children, and we serve, like I said, adults and children from the age of four and older and these are adults and children that can have physical disabilities or cognitive disabilities or emotional disabilities.

We use the entire environment of the horse so students are introduced to the horse in the barn and to the best of their ability, we encourage them to groom the horse, to handle the horse, to lead the horse, put the tack on the horse. We do the mounted part of that and then if, sometimes they’re able to also help us with the horse after the lesson.

It is something we try to look at holistically and we are teaching riding skills, but that is the way through to dealing with the deficits of the student, whether it’s more of a learning situation or more of a healing situation, but the way we get to the student to help them is through being with the animals, with the horses.

We do get referrals from occupational therapists in the area, physical therapists in the area, ABA therapists. We have served children who have been sponsored by Social Services in Frederick and Warren counties. We’ll be doing that as well in Clarke County, hopefully. A lot of it’s word of mouth as well. Our parents who are quite pleased with the progress of their children will tell others about it. We have people, parents and so forth, that know or have heard that this is a wonderful way to help their child and they’ll look us up.

We’re members of the Professional Association for Therapeutic Horsemanship International Path. We’re also members of the Therapeutic Riding Association of Virginia, or TRAV, so parents find us quite often through those websites. We offer two eight-week sessions. Where we are currently, we do not have an indoor arena, so that limits our amount of time that we can spend outside so we’re kind of weather restricted. We do two eight-week sessions. We’re starting one in April that’ll run into early June. That is then followed by two weeks of summer camp. This year, we planned summer camp the week of June, I believe it’s the 24th, then we skip a week and then July 8th, I believe, that week they’re half-day day camps and then we start again with their eight-week session in September, soon after Labor Day, and go into the beginning of November.

I’ve been involved in therapeutic riding since 1987, when I was in grad school at the University of Virginia, and spent some time as the President of the Therapeutic Riding Association of Virginia and taught at several different centers and decided in 2006 to go ahead and found the Blue Ridge Center because there was not a center in the area that was offering services to these counties. So a colleague and I started the Center then. We have moved three times so far but it’s an absolute passion of mine and it’s something that I find is very rewarding for the volunteers as well as for our students.

Students come to us all different ages, different disabling conditions and what we find is, the children, the number one thing is they’re enjoying themselves. They’re getting a sense of accomplishment. The horses are, basically, the horse doesn’t see their disability. The horse is just there as a friend but learning the skills, learning the grooming skills and all that sort of thing, ’cause they’re working with things like sequencing and following directions and motor planning and we do set goals and objectives for the students for the sessions and we do produce progress reports at the end of the sessions, so we are able to plan ahead, and we use a lot of games in our lessons. We’re able to, like I said, work with someone’s balance, improve their balance, improve their vocabulary, improve their ability to sequence, to follow directions, to take turns, all those sorts of things. Also, it could be modulating behaviors, being able to talk about feelings. Sometimes a child can talk to a horse about something before they can talk to a person.

Blue Ridge Center for Therapeutic Horsemanship is a non-profit organization, a 501c3 , and our tuition, we do charge tuition, and our tuition covers approximately 30% of our budget. Approximately half of our students require some sort of scholarships, some sort of sponsorship, and half of those need to be totally sponsored for the services that we provide. In order to bring those funds into the program, we hold fundraising events. We have an annual campaign. We write grant proposals and we solicit for donations in several different ways. We will do things such as holding clinics and so forth even for just the general population and just continually experimenting with and coming up with new ideas for how to fund the organization.

At the Blue Ridge Center for Therapeutic Horsemanship, we rely on many, many volunteers. Without the volunteers, there would be no programs. Our lesson volunteers are required to have some pretty good horse experience and then we train them in the BRCTH way, but people don’t have to have horse experience. They can start out as side walkers, where they’re responsible for the rider and also assist in the barn with the grooming and so forth. The minimum age to be a lesson volunteer is 14. We love our teenagers and they can help. Especially, we usually have quite a few teenagers for camp and it’s a wonderful way to earn community service hours and I’m also able to write some pretty good reference letters for Spot scholarships and college applications and also for job references and so forth for our volunteers. We love our volunteers. Volunteers help in other ways. They help in general with the barn, with helping to take care of the horses, like this weekend, we’re gonna have another TLC day for the horses now that they’re really starting to shed out. But they can help with the fundraisers and they can help with some of the administrative types of activities and so forth. We rely very, very heavily on our volunteers.

At Blue Ridge Center, if we could ask for one thing right now that we most need, it is a new site. The facility that we’ve been leasing for the last three years has been on the market and it has been sold and so we are in search of a new facility. We were to start our session April 8th. We are hoping that we can salvage our spring session and we are looking in Frederick County and Clarke County specifically. We have pretty specific needs. We can’t share our facility with another equine business because of liability issues and so forth. That right now is my prime number one goal responsibility is to find us a new home.

At Blue Ridge Center for Therapeutic Horsemanship, we have four instructors, one of them is me. We are all certified through Professional Association for Therapeutic Horsemanship, or PATH, and we require to re-certify on an annual basis. We have different backgrounds. One of our instructors is actually an Occupational Therapist and we all are trained to work specifically to teach riding and teach riding skills specifically for individuals that have disabling conditions, that have special needs. We have a very extensive registration process, so we look at IEPs, we look at a lot of physicians’ referrals and statements and occupational therapist reports and so forth and we gain as much information as we possibly can so that we can write appropriate goals and objectives for each of the students.

I have been in this business for more than 30 years. I have a Master’s in Special Ed, so I was able to combine my experience with being a professional horsewoman with being a professional educator. I have just seen so much progress and so many breakthroughs and so many heartwarming, I’m starting to choke up right now so many heartwarming events with our students over the years. and horses made a big different in my life, especially when I was a teenager. I love being in the barn, I loved being around them. I love seeing the children progress and seeing the parents’ eyes light up It’s a passion of mine and I don’t know when I’ll ever stop.

Blue Ridge Center for Therapeutic Horsemanship, like I said, is a non-profit organization. We accept donations of in kind and we also accept monetary donations. We have a Facebook page as well. Our website is www.BRCTH.org. Individuals are able to make donations directly there. They can make donations from our Facebook page as well. We always encourage people to like our page so they can keep them up to date on what’s going on at the facility and what fundraising events are coming up and so forth. We always encourage people to contact us and come out and visit and see what it is that we do. Watch our students, watch our horses, watch our volunteers and our phenomenal certified instructors do what they do day to day.