Healing Strides Of Va

Mental health, education and coaching: our mhec program grew considerably with serving the population of adults with substance abuse. We were able to serve a new 60 people a week in this program just with substance abuse, finding that we made a major change in their outlook and perspective for their life. We have had graduates of this program come back and share that they are still sober and that we made the difference. We also added an evidence based model, called brief strategic family therapy to our services and being the second licensed facility in the state and the only facility to add horses to the model. A rare accomplishment. We had the first therapist/coach become fully paneled in our state. Foster children and children of trauma are still our primary target and working with them individually and also with their families has shown to make changes that have become sustainable. We have grown our field trips and one time visits substantially and find that we are able to see children say their first words in a short period of time due to the quick relationship that is built with the horse. In both programs we have served over 12,000 horse/human interactions, 18,000 volunteer hours given to us by our community helping us to serve 65 distinct disabilities and numerous complex disabilities. Along with continuing to grow the existing programs we added the several mentioned above. Healing strides is recognized as a leader in our industry.