Sometimes, the smallest things make the biggest difference.
At HorseBack, we are always looking to refine and improve our courses and our methods. We constantly discuss ways to make things better and to help our veterans and young people more comprehensively. So much has changed since we first started that people coming back to us now would hardly recognise the place.
Some of these changes are pretty major. But some of them are absolutely tiny, and came about almost by chance, and are completely transformative.
One of the happiest of these is the invention of the HorseBack WhatsApp groups.This doesn’t sound like much. After all, everyone has a WhatsApp group. You’ve got one with your granny who doesn’t really understand the internet, and you’ve probably got some kind of work one which makes your heart sink, and you might have a secret one with your oldest friends where everyone can share their most unrepeatable jokes. WhatsApp groups are everywhere. Backbenchers have them so they can plot against the government, and families have them, and friends have them. They are so much a part of modern life that most people take them for granted.
So we didn’t really give it a thought when our co-founder, Emma Hutchison, started setting up WhatsApp groups for every veterans’ course. She didn’t make a thing about it. There was no fanfare or song and dance. But now, the HorseBack team thinks this is one of the most brilliant things that Emma has ever done.
One of the dangers of HorseBack was that our courses were – if we can say so without blowing our own trumpet – too good. The veterans who came here found so much companionship and confidence and hope in these hills that they would have a terrible crash when they went home. They missed the horses and the comradeship and the view. Because of this, we changed our courses from a single week to three, staggered over several months, so the veterans always had something to look forward to. This helped a lot.
But the transformative moment was the WhatsApp innovation. Now, the veterans who have bonded on their courses can easily stay in touch. They message each other banter and memes and comical videos. (They spend a lot of time making each other laugh like drains.) But more importantly, they check in on each other. If someone is having a bad day, the others rally round. If one of them needs to vent, the others listen. It is the most amazing therapeutic process and it’s developed entirely organically. We love the emotional intelligence with which the veterans use this resource, and we feel incredibly happy as we watch them keep each other’s spirits up. There’s a lot of courage and a lot of honesty in those groups, and we are in awe of that too.
So there is one tiny thing, a thing that probably every teenager in the land uses, and it has completely changed the way that our HorseBack courses function. It has enhanced the teamwork, removed entirely the dreaded sense of isolation that so many veterans suffer, and restored purpose. If you’ve got to be there for your crew, then you have a serious job to do.
We would never have guessed, when this innovation started, that Emma was on to something profound. But she was, and the results have been glorious to see.
