Healing Strides of Virginia

“The form 990 was given and reviewed by the board of directors prior to filing.”

“Conflicts of interest are discussed during board meetings.”

“Compensation of the executive director is determined by the board after reviewing performance and comparability data and trends.”

“All governing documents are made available on request.”

“Therapeutic riding horsemanship program: 2024 has been a challenging year, with the rate of child and adult suicide increasing and the need for helping both young and old is ever increasing. The need is much more than the services that we are able to offer. We continue to place priority on growth and serving more and more people. With the horse being not only the equalizer but also the motivator for our participants we help as many people as we can. By giving them opportunity to thrive and grow in confidence, physical capacity and strength along with resilency and focus. We are serving 200 people a week and find that by serving those they are able to affect their families by their own healing and therefore their community also. We are aware of individuals that have stated our facility "saved their life" on a literal basis because of the connections that are made in our programming not only with our horses but also with our staff. Physical therapy, occupational therapy and speech therapy are still foundations of our clinical practice in conjunction with our local hospital system. We are in the process of growing this program to serve more people.”

“Mental health, education and coaching: our mhec program grew considerably with serving the population of adults with substance abuse. We were able to serve a new 60 people a week in this program just with substance abuse, finding that we made a major change in their outlook and perspective for their life. We have had graduates of this program come back and share that they are still sober and that we made the difference. We also added an evidence based model, called brief strategic family therapy to our services and being the second licensed facility in the state and the only facility to add horses to the model. A rare accomplishment. We had the first therapist/coach become fully paneled in our state. Foster children and children of trauma are still our primary target and working with them individually and also with their families has shown to make changes that have become sustainable. We have grown our field trips and one time visits substantially and find that we are able to see children say their first words in a short period of time due to the quick relationship that is built with the horse. In both programs we have served over 12,000 horse/human interactions, 18,000 volunteer hours given to us by our community helping us to serve 65 distinct disabilities and numerous complex disabilities. Along with continuing to grow the existing programs we added the several mentioned above. Healing strides is recognized as a leader in our industry.”