Business of Hope Training with Hope Reins

This month the board and staff of Blue Sky Acres completed training with a Christian organization in Raleigh that uses horses to bring hope and healing to children in crisis. We attended part one of the training back in May, so it was quite incredible to look back and see how much progress we have made since then! We also had two one-on-one Zoom calls with the founder of the organization, Kim Tschirret.

Hope Reins is a very successful organization now with 22 staff members and 17 horses, and they have now completed over 16,000 one on one sessions with children in crisis. Hallie did an internship with them back in 2014 and has had the opportunity to watch how God has blessed them over the years. A book about one of the former horses called "Joey" has been published by Tyndale House and showed the journey about how God led Kim to start the organization. In some ways, their journey reminds us a lot of how God is doing things at Blue Sky Acres and we hope that we will be able to follow in their footsteps!

Here are just a few tidbits we learned from the trainings:

1. Culture eats strategy for breakfast-The team at Hope Reins shared their successes and pitfalls and emphasized the fact that by creating a culture, you can really avoid a lot of problems and conflicts. As a Christian organization, we want to be founded on Christian principles.
2. People can give time, talent or treasure-they emphasized that there are no human ATMs and everyone who gives in these three areas should be invited into a relationship and asked about their connection to the ministry.
3. Creating a safe space-on the programs side, they really emphasized that the activity spaces themselves need to be open and planned in order to create a feeling of safety and peace in the participants. A chaotic environment is the last thing that kids in trauma need to experience.
4. Harvard study on children in trauma-this study determined that children who have one healthy adult relationship is the key to resilience and helping them to overcome the trauma they have experienced.
5. Creating a funnel-they mentioned that barn chores is a big focus of what they do, which they open up to everyone and then from there, they help people fit into the volunteer team that best fits them. We would like to implement the same type of funnel once we get our property!