Dare To Dream Therapeutic Horsemanship Center Celebrates 10th Anniversary Part 2
In Part 1 of this story, Marsha Lunsford, Executive Director of Dare To Dream Therapeutic Horsemanship Center in Highland County gave us more details on the non-profit. She now talks about how Dare To Dream went from dream to reality.
“You know, I was a horse kid, loved horses from the beginning – just had a thing for them. But I didn’t have any horses for about 30 years. And my husband went out west hunting, you know, on horseback, and he came back and he’s like, ‘I love horses. I think we need to get a horse.’ And we’re living in Northern Virginia, in the suburbs, and I was like, ‘Are you crazy? You don’t even know what you’re saying.’ “
Well, then, as luck would have it, he’s a mortgage banker, and he was doing a loan and refinancing a horse farm. So he was like, ‘You got come out here.’ We went out there and we saw this beautiful Palomino. He told me before we went out there, it’s the most beautiful horse I’ve ever seen. I said, you know, I always wanted a Palomino. Eventually we end up with this beautiful Palomino, and we still have him, Sonny. We’ve had him for 22 years.”
“And I was in the behavioral health care field, not as a clinician, but as an administrative executive kind of person for 24 years. And so I was really into behavior, you know, wellness and productivity measures, things that would help an employer manage their employees. And I heard about therapeutic riding, Therapeutic Horsemanship, and I was like, ‘Oh, this just makes sense to me,’ because having had a 30 year break away from horses and then getting back and being all involved within them and everything, it was changing me and my suburban stress was manageable, and that kind of thing. I just enjoyed the barn community and everything that was really missing in my life, and didn’t know. So I started a file, and every time I would see an article on Therapeutic Horsemanship, I would just chuck it in there. And there are a lot of different types, you know – minis going to hospitals for visits, and all different kinds of ways that horses are helping people right now. So I just decided that I was going to do it.
“And we bought our property, it was just fields and woods and stuff. And then we started building a cabin, and then we built the barn, and we had the horses move down, and the pastures and the fencing, and, you know, it’s like something going on all the time. We were sitting in the yard one time, and I said, ‘How did all this happen?’. He said, ‘dare to dream baby.’ So whenever it came time to open this therapeutic riding center, and took the steps to do it, and decided to call it Dare To Dream.”
“So 10 years ago, with the help of Bonnie Baxley, I got a an LLC to get Dare To Dream started, and I became a certified therapeutic riding instructor through PATH – it’s an organization, Professional Association of Therapeutic Horsemanship. I completed all that and was finally ready in 2015 to get started. But there was a lot of administrative things to do, you know, develop the website and develop policies, and all of the things you have to do, you know, when you’re starting an entity.”
When we started off too, I had three really big horses. And one of the last things I did at my corporate job was to work on a project called Military One Source, and that’s a number that anyone in any military branch can call if they’re having anything go on, and then be directed to the proper – because in the military, and all their benefits and everything is kind of tangled web. So I was working on getting that up and running, and I just started thinking about all the sacrifices and everything that military families make. So because I had three really big horses, and our property is pretty rugged, I thought I’m going to work with combat vets, and I went to special clinics and everything to get that going. And so we did start in 2015 with a couple of riders that came from our community, but also we worked with combat vets that came in for a retreat.”
“But the longer that I was in the community here, and, you know, understanding kind of the needs, you know, my focus really has shifted – about 95% of what we do is with people locally, either in Highland or Bath or Pocahontas, nearby areas.”
Stay tuned for Part 3 of this story, which talks about Dare To Dream’s upcoming 10th anniversary event
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