Dare To Dream Therapeutic Horsemanship Center Celebrates 10th Anniversary Part 1

A Highland County non-profit is getting ready to celebrate their 10^th anniversary in operation, and to learn more, we spoke with….

“I am Marsha Lunsford with Dare To Dream Therapeutic Horsemanship Center – I’m the Executive Director there.”

“We are a Center for people to come to with all types of challenges, any kind of special needs. Some people have physical, sometimes it’s social, or cognitive issues that they have problems with, and so we help them with that through horses. Really, the horses are the ones who are the therapists – I’m just the program director there.”

“So we’re located in Mill Gap. We’re kind of high up on the mountain, so we have beautiful views and a lot of privacy and not a lot of distractions, other than just the beauty of nature. The horses, we have six currently, they range from, you know, 13 and 1/2 hands to just shy of 17 hands. We do lessons Tuesday through Saturday.”

She talked more about what the lessons entail.

“Every lesson is very different. They’re all individual lessons that we do up there, unless we have a special camp. Some people have extreme cognitive issues, some people are nonverbal, and other people are very handicapped, and they, you know, they may be paralyzed on one side, or an amputee or something. So there’s a wide disparity of issues that we’re dealing with, with people.”

“So kind of, we meet them where they are –  we select the right horse for that person, and we might spend a lot of time out of the round pen working on the ground, building up confidence. So let’s say someone new is starting, and let’s say that person has a physical handicap, and that wasn’t something they had their whole life, and so their world has suddenly become, “I can’t” –  that’s what their mind is coming from. So I want to start and build from that and say, like, “Maybe you can, you know.”

“So the first thing we do is we take a beautiful horse, I like to keep my horses all pretty and beautiful, and so then we go out and we work in this round pen – it’s a 50-foot round pen –  to kind of just work on the ground, get them used to the horse coming up to them, and understanding the horse is gentle, you know, because most people have anxiety when they get up close to a horse.”

“A lot of the relationship between people and horses, it all springs from trust and respect. And so whenever they understand that they can trust the horse a little bit, and they maybe can win the horse’s respect a little bit, then it kind of changes how they feel about maybe getting on their back.”

“So after this person has built up some confidence, despite whatever physical limitations they might have, then we can see, okay, would they be a candidate to ride? Not everybody can ride. You know, sometimes they may have a disability that precludes them from being on a horseback. So then that person eventually, when they come, we might spend some time grooming the horse, and just letting them warm up with a horse, and then go out and get on, and we have a mounting ramp so that mounting is very easy. And then, that last thing, they get to ride, you know, and they get to ride around. And, you know, it can be pretty magical how people feel after they’ve been thinking, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” and then just say, “Wow, I can ride a horse.”

“And I mean, I have a lot of respect for them. It takes guts to get on a horse when you’re paralyzed or something. I can’t even imagine it, you know, and I’m around them all the time. I admire them so much for being that brave.”

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this story, where we learn about how Dare To Dream came to be.