Raising $165,000 - one dollar at a time!

Funding Update: As of today, we've raised $26! Don't laugh - each and every single dollar we raise counts towards our final goal, and we greatly appreciate all purchases and donations, no matter how large or how small.

I have approximately 550 days to raise $165,000, which means I need to raise approximately $300 a day. Right now we are no where near that goal, so my job over the next couple of days is to expand the store and continue to get the word out. If you know of anyone who you think would like to support our cause, please forward them a link to our blog.

We are currently fundraising in two ways: Accepting cash donations ($20.00 to date!) and by earning a commission on items sold through our shop ($6.00 so far!). If you haven't visited our store, please do! We have some great items , including Jake's Place EFEL Tshirts, tote bags, coasters, stickers and buttons, and Jake's Place Autism Therapy teddy bears, buttons, magnets and more!

A big thank you and (((HUGZ))) to those of you who have already shown your support! You are helping me lay the foundation of Jake's Place, and I appreciate you more than you could possibly know!

Equine Facilitated Experiential Learning

When I talk about opening Jake's Place, one of the most common questions I get is "What the heck is Equine Facilitated Experiential Learning (EFEL)"? EFEL is, in its simplest form, is using horses as mirrors and facilitators to help us explore issues or areas of concern in our lives. The horses may help us achieve self awareness, solve problems, and uncover issues in our lives that are holding us back and keeping us from advancing on a physical, spiritual and/or emotional level. EFEL is not psychotherapy, and should not be used in place of psychiatric treatment, or to try and deal with psychotic/psychiatric disorders.

I first heard of EFEL when I read Linda Kohanov's book The Tao of Equus, and before I got through Linda's explanation, I knew exactly what she was talking about. One of the reasons I believe I have had such a deep connection to horses my entire life is because of their ability to help me heal from various traumatic events starting when I was very young. Women are often faces with things that men are less likely to encounter; physical abuse from partners, sexual abuse and molestation, and subordinate treatment from various sources including teachers, employers and partners. Long after we have dealt with these issues in a psychiatric setting, we are often still struggling to regain our personal power and heal our inner child. Horses are the perfect partners to aid in the final steps of our recovery processes.

My goal for the EFEL side of Jake's Place is to provide a safe, nurturing environment where women in the final stages of recovery (be it from abuse, addiction, low self esteem, etc) can explore and finalize their healing through the way of the horse. Our EFEL center will offer a safe, comfortable environment for exploration and healing.

Who are the horses? Glad you asked!

We currently have two horses on the roster at Jake's Place, my 19 year old Arabian mare Provacative (Proletariat x SF Katia) and our little girl My Little Obsesshahn (Bey Intuishahn E x GW Barbidansk).

Pro has been with me for a little more than three years now. She's an interesting horse; generally grumpy and not real friendly, Pro is not the horse that you would look at first when you think "therapy horse." But she really becomes a different horse around kids (she is especially protective of the little ones) and when she has precious cargo on her back, she suddenly becomes as incredibly beautiful on the inside as she is on the outside. Since Arabians tend to live long lives, with any luck Pro will be with us for many, many years to come.

So far Obie is the exact oposite of Provacativ. Always friendly and seemingling full of joy, she openly loves people and is the first one up to the fence for a love and a scritch. It will be a long time before anyone is riding Obie, but in the meantime she can do a great job of standing around and looking cute, and eventually be a great horse for kids to learn to groom on.

Is there a need?

When I share the dream of Jake's Place with other folks, I tend to get mixed reactions. Some are happy for me and instantly supportive, and other's tend to ask two questions: Aren't there already therapy centers out there? and Why aren't you going to be an NPO?

To answer the first question, yes, there are a lot of therapeutic riding centers out there, and they do great works and accomplish wonderful things and change lives. But as a parent of a child with a disability, I have to say that the majority of the therapeutic riding centers out there today do not meet my needs.

When children without disabilities go to ride horses or take riding lessons their experience is very, very different than the experience of those with disabilities. When a mainstream child goes for riding lessons, for example, they usually spend a day or two learning about horses, how to walk around them, how to approach them, how to brush them and groom them, and then how to saddle them and prepare for riding. Once they have learned these tasks, they are placed on the horse and either in a ring with the instructor holding a lead line that is attached to the horse, or without a line, they are taught how to sit and hold the reins and communicate with the horse to get it to walk, and then later to go faster. If the kids are going to a "trail ride" place, where trail horses are used to give people guided rides, they are usually put on the horse and allowed to ride by themselves.

Contrast this to therapeutic riding for kids with disabilities: They may or may not be given an opportunity to pet and greet the horse. Then they are placed on the horse with someone walking next to them on each side, and one person out front, leading the horse. They are then led around the ring in circles; sometimes they do therapeutic games like opening mail boxes or "picking apples." Then they are taken off the horse until they come back next time. It is assumed that because a child is disabled, he or she is not capable of approaching horses the way the rest of us are - maybe out of fear of injury, or out of lack of confidence, or whatever - but the fact is, in general, their experience with horses is very far removed from those of children without disabilities.

There are a few centers in the US that have started using a more hands on approach, but at this time, they are still few and far between. I know from my experience with my son and other children with autism that he is very capable of learning how to "be" with a horse. The teaching is different, the approach is different, but the end result is that children with autism are, in most cases, perfectly capable of learning to ride and care for a horse, and horses make excellent healers. It is a match made in heaven.

As to the second question, the reason that Jake's Place will be a for profit enterprise is pretty straight forward. Children with Autism have parents, and those parents are usually realllly stressed and realllyyy tired. It is rare that we have regular baby sitters and get out on our own on a regular basis, so it is important to me that when a parent brings their child to Jake's Place for their lesson, we have a first rate facility in place for the parent to relax. For the hour that they are at our ranch, I want those parents to be sitting back with their feet up, enjoying soft music and smelling good smells and snacking and relaxing and destressing. I do not want to have to justify to any entity - and especially the US Government - why my NPO horse center has a lush and plush lounge with state of the art electronics and gurgling fountains. And really, I know that there is only so much grant money to go around, so many NPO funds to go around, and I am confident we can operate on a for profit basis and with the help of the Lord and contributions from caring angels, we will be just fine.

If you're interested in helping Jake's Place, please visit our store, where you will find some great swag, or feel Free to make a non-tax deductible donation! Any little bit helps, and we appreciate every penny that comes in!

In the Beginning

Looking back I can't remember when the exact date was, but I guess it was in late 2002. I was at a crossroads in my life - a dark, damp dead end that held me in its steely claws of indecision - and I was finally ready to wake up to the sun, if only I knew how.

2001 had been a very rough year for us. We had lost our business and most of our friends, and the baby that we hadn't expected turned out to be a whole lot of work even before he was born. My husband decided to go back to college, and I was struggling to support the family on income from my then very small marketing business, and when I couldn't work because of complications from my pregnancy, it seemed like we'd be having our baby out in the street.

But then the tide turned and things started to come together as they so often do, and our beautiful little boy was born and I went back to work and my husband was doing great with school and all seemed right with the world. Except something wasn't right. I had a stirring, a restless calling deep in my soul, and I needed to find a way to figure out what it was that was missing from my life. I actually had a pretty good idea of what it was, but I was having a hard time facing it. There was no way I could go there in my head, because the second I did, my heart would be broken. So I did what anyone in my position would do, I ignored what my soul was telling me and went on to pursue a whole bunch of meaningless other stuff to try and shut my inner self up.

If I remember correctly, during the course of that year I started to learn digital photography, I got involved with a "save the trees" organization, I started exploring and mapping back forest roads, I found a group of online friends to email and talk to, and I started redecorating. All of this made for great busy work, but it did nothing to stop the clamoring in my brain. It was during a trip to see my in-laws that my soul completely over powered me, and I heard myself nonchalantly saying to my husband "I don't think I can live much longer with out a horse in my life. It's been 10 years, and I really don't think I can go another day." What? Huh? Who said that!?? In the four years I had been with my husband, I had brought up horses maybe once, and so he did what any good husband would do, he looked at me like I was insane.

It was decided that I could not have a horse at that time, but my father-in-law did go out and buy one (I need to thank him for that again) and I before I knew it I was riding once every month or two. Surprisingly, this did not help. In fact, it seemed to make things worse. So of course it only makes sense that I would start trying to get my horse fix other ways; reading books, buying magazines, looking at horses for sale online and finding other horse folks to talk to. One day I walked into Borders to see if there was any new material to get my fix, and there I saw a book that I hadn't seen before, The Tao of Equus. The cover was cool and the back intriguing - here was a book about my first true love, horses, and something that I seemed to spend my entire adult life trying to achieve, healing. By the time I finished the book a week later, I knew what my calling was - I needed to open my own equine facilitated experiential learning facility.

I knew opening my center was what I was supposed to do the second I learned that there was such a thing. Over the years I had become very involved in my spiritual quest, and I had many women come to me for advice or help, and I found helping women discover their own inner power the most rewarding part of what I did. The second I realized that people were using horses to help women find themselves, I knew that was it. At that moment I decided that I really needed to buy a horse, and in March of 2003 I bought my first horse in 10 years, a lovely Arabian mare.

Once I had my horse, life got busy in a hurry. My husband decided to re-enlist in the service and was deployed, my business was picking up, and my son was having some developmental issues. The next thing I knew it was August of 2005, and my beautiful little boy, the joy of my life, my sunshine, my reason for being, my little Jake was diagnosed with Autism. In that moment, my world came to a screeching halt. I couldn't breathe, I couldn't think, I couldn't live, and the only thing that got me through was my daily trip to the barn. Without those big brown eyes sending love my way and that musky scent of horse and hay waking me up each time I entered the barn, I really don't think I would have made it through that very difficult and very painful period in my life.

The next year and a half found me enveloped in the land of "Parents of a child with a disability," which was a scary, crazy, maddening place to be. We met with specialists, psychologists, OTs, STs, PTs, and the state Early Intervention providers. We had to learn how to live in Jake's world while simultaneously working to draw him into ours - always trying to draw him into ours.
Over the past year and a half, Jake has made some great improvements, some amazing improvements, some of which can only be attributed to our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Others came through hard work on all of our parts, but especially Jake's part. Since his disability causes him to be oblivious to danger, and since he gets very excited and hyper when presented with new stimulation, I kept my horse life separate from my world with Jake. I used my horse time to renew, recharge, and refocus. I never lost site of my dream to open my center, but I never got any closer to making it a reality, either. Then a few months ago, something wonderful happened. Jake came with me to the barn.

Horses have an amazing ability to heal humans, but beyond that, certain horses (the Arabian breed is knows for this trait) are able to sense when people are in need - be it emotionally, physically or even developmentally. The day that Jake came to the barn with me, I put him up on my mare, who is fairly high strung and off the lead line is only suitable for an experienced rider. I knew that she would be well behaved while I led her around, but her reaction in the ring surprised even me; the second Jake was on her back she immediately lowered her head and relaxed her whole body, taking each step like she was well aware of the precious cargo on her back. 30 minutes later I had to force Jake down, and he was a different child. Riding seems to give him a different type of aweness, and he seems more secure in his world as a result.

So now I know the rest of my future, and my calling is complete. I am working towards opening Jake's Place Equestrian Center - where horses heal humans. Jake's Place will provide two distinct yet complimentary services; providing therapeutic hands-on horse skills to children with Autism, and providing Equine Facilitated Experiential Learning sessions for women seeking growth, recovery and/or change. Jake's Place will be a for profit center, providing excellent service and amenities in the incredibly beautiful setting of the mountains of Oregon.

I am currently in the beginning stages of raising the $165,000 needed for a down payment on the purchase of land and facilities. If you would like to see Jake's Place become a reality, you can show your support by purchasing items from our shop, or by giving a cash donation. We have a long way to go to see Jake's Place open to it's first visitor, but I know that with persistence, dedication, and a little help from the angels along the way, we'll get there!