We come back to the blog after some time away with a renewed sense of purpose. We have been thinking about the mission at the heart of HorseBack. At the very start, it was something we called Mobility with Dignity. Jock and Emma, our co-founders, saw a report about young military personnel coming back from Afghanistan with life-changing injuries. The seed was planted. These young men might not be able to walk and run as they once did, but we could get them on a horse and send them up into the hills. The horses would lend the men their power.
It felt very pure and very real and very meaningful, and those early days saw crews of people inventing and reinventing saddles so that they could get someone with an amputation from the hip onto the back of a horse.
But then we noticed something. It wasn’t the mobility, so much. It wasn’t really the romantic idea of being able to send someone up into the Scottish hills that was making the difference. It was spending time in this peace and beauty, with these extraordinary sentient four-legged creatures, who did not judge. Horses do not care about injuries, about addiction or about abusive behaviour, they care how you make them feel in the moment. Can they trust you? Can they rely on you? Can you make them feel safe?
And so, a new incarnation was born. The physical injuries kept coming, but we were focusing much more on the mental injuries. These were the insidious wounds that could not be seen. People who did not want to live went away with – almost literally – a new lease of life.
We started working with serving personnel, men and women who were burnt-out and needed reviving. We began a schools programme, thanks in large part to an amazing local headmaster who saw that we might be able to transform his most troubled pupils. Then we put the military personnel with the youngsters, which was, even if we say so ourselves, a stroke of genius, because each cohort benefited mightily from the other. The children got mentored by people who had been to hell and lived to tell the tale. The military guys felt as if they were really giving something back. (And service and duty is mostly why they joined up in the first place.)
With any small charity you have to keep moving and expanding and getting creative. Those military men and women will always be how we started and who we are. Three of our permanent team are veterans. We know the language, the jokes, the dark nights of the soul. We shall never, ever forget. But we now work with young people for the King’sTrust, and we have programmes in association with the council for vulnerable men and women, many with substance abuse issues or generational trauma, and we are looking to replicate our programmes in a southern hub.
If we made a list for you now of all the things we are doing, it would take all day. We’ve got something running with the NHS and we are also working with a group of Ukrainians. But what is so lovely, as we look back to those humble beginnings – two people with four horses and a dream – is that the mission has not really changed at all. Not the fundamentals of it. It’s going to sound corny, but you know it’s true – we suspect if you are reading this, you’ve felt something like it yourself. We want to help people. We see problems, and we want to develop the skills to fix those problems. We take our collective qualities and talents and skills and we put them to good use – so a wounded veteran might remember what the point of it all is, or a schoolchild might find a friendship group, or a young person might be confident enough to apply for a job. Some of the problems we see run deep, but some don’t require rocket science. A lot of the people who come through our gates simply need someone who is in their corner; someone who believes in them so that they can learn to believe in themselves.
That’s our service, and our duty. These are old-fashioned words and we don’t apologise for them. They get us out of bed in the morning. And they keep us moving forward.
