SANTA YNEZ VALLEY THERAPEUTIC RIDING PROGRAM

Our organization's goals include providing people with disabilities an opportunity to receive therapeutic riding instruction under professional direction in a safe environment, to improve the quality of life for our students, and to provide our services to students regardless of their ability to pay. Our objective to improve the quality of life of our students' is through the improvement of their physical, emotional and social skills and to serve more students on a continual basis. In order to monitor our success, we keep current records to track the number of students, tuition and lessons. We meet annually with students and parents to discuss goals (both riding and life skills) for the upcoming year. Every October students/parents are asked to complete an evaluation of our Program and meet with their riding instructor to discuss goals they have for the upcoming year. This is an on-going program offered year-round. We strive to serve 65+ people per week and 300 annually.

Programmatic – We are planning to grow our student base by 20% over the next 3 years, and by 10% this year. Our goals include improving staff education to better serve our clients and building our vocation program. It is our goal to be able to serve the students on our waiting list.

Financial – It is our goal to increase tuition to cover 25% of our budget (up from 15%) over the next 3 years, and we are doing a modest tuition increase this May, for the first time in a decade. The board is working on donor cultivation with two board committees and outside training. We are also focusing on event sponsorships to increase revenue in 2022.

Administrative – We are updating our website and other social media platforms to better serve our clients and community. In addition, key staff are being trained and certified to lead an equine assisted reading program.

Capital Project – We have a new set of facility plans to increase the number of horse pens at our location. It is our goal to have more horses, in order to serve more people.

We are working towards serving our waiting list, responding to the needs of an aging population, and having more students with sensory disorders and Autism diagnoses. In 5 years our goal is to serve 100 students a week with a budget of $500,000.
We are exploring adding a physical and occupational therapy component to our program and billing insurance. There are a lot of rules that we must comply with and are in the exploratory/feasibility phase.

We will be educated in and advertising for planned giving (we have a donor that we are working with and will feature in our next newsletter). We have a new endowment donor that has given once and is planning to give three more times, which we continue to cultivate, and will be complete in 5 years. We have invested two small endowments and are working towards eventually building them to provide 25% of our income. We will be part-way to that goal in 5 years.

We can accommodate up to 65 students per week with our 10 horses. To reach our next goals to serve 75 students per week and then 100 students per week, we will need more operating funds and 2-4 more horses. All of our instructors are certified and our organization undergoes annual reporting and a 5-year audit by our accrediting body, the Professional Association of Therapeutic Horsemanship International. We measure our expenses against other Professional Associate of Therapeutic Horsemanship organizations and have several models for growth.

We have maintained excellent quality as tested by our student retention and Professional Association of Therapeutic Horsemanship International's rating. We are working hard towards a more sustainable model and diversifying our income streams.