Forward Stride

Clinical services (rehabilitative services and equine facilitated psychotherapy) our rehabilitative services (hippotherapy) program is therapy for people with physical and developmental challenges. Our licensed and highly trained therapists provide physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech and language pathology. Each clinician uses the uniquely therapeutic and challenging movement of the horse to add to the other benefits and modalities of their field of expertise. We served 15-20 clients each week, for a total of 29 lives touched throughout the year. We also partnered with providence to provide occupational therapy to 12 individuals. Our equine assisted psychotherapy (eap) is therapy for personal growth and treatment for those with mental health diagnoses. Sessions are available for adults, adolescents, and children, which can take place in an individual, family, or group therapy setting. We served 13-19 clients each week, for a total of 53 lives touched throughout the year. A sub program of our eap program is our mentoring program. Youth between the ages of 6 and 18 who are in the foster system are paired with trained mentors and horses that they meet with weekly. Starting in the 2023 school year, we are providing services to 3 mentees per week. Weekly sessions are held year round, with the exception of 1 or 2 weeks of break at the end of each quarterly session.

Personal development (volunteer, professional development, equine assisted learning) our volunteer program provides opportunities for everyone over the age of 12 to give back to our organization and learn new skills. We had between 150 and 175 volunteers per week and about 210 total individuals throughout the year. These volunteers help with our clinical services, inclusive equestrian sports and assist with caring for our herd of therapy horses and ponies. Our professional development program continued to provide mentoring to 3 path intl. Certified therapeutic riding instructors. Equine assisted learning (eal) is an experiential learning approach that promotes the development of life skills for educational, professional and personal goals through equine-assisted activities. Some of the learning included communication, body language, group dynamics and problem solving. We partnered with victory academy and served 18 youth through this partnership. We also partnered with nara (native american rehabilitation association). Youth from their residential treatment program came once a week through the year and we served 63 youth total. One final partnership we had was with the janus youth program and maclaren youth correctional facility. We spent 8 weeks taking two horses to maclaren youth correctional facility providing groundwork and horsemanship skills to 8 youth. In the fall of 2023 we launched a new subset of the eal program, our equine assisted coaching program. This program is facilitated by a certified life coach and a path intl. Equine specialist in mental health and learning. We offered 10 workshops with themes around setting intentions, mindfulness, confidence building and leadership and served over 30 individuals. This program's revenue and expenses are collected under the umbrella of eal.

New build/facility we erected a new shelter to protect our clients working in our smaller outdoor arena. This space now offers an area protected from the weather and affords excellent privacy. We improved existing paddock spaces to include shelters that are usable the whole year. This means that our horses no longer need to come into our interior stalls unless they are recovering from injury or illness. Making these improvements saves us costs on bedding and ensures horses are able to live in more enriching spaces with social interactions when not working. We also replaced the large stall gates in all of the barns because the previous gates were no longer safe after welds broke.