You've got questions, we've got answers!

We love volunteers and appreciate when folks want to help out. Volunteering is also a great way to gain valuable skills about working with and around horses and ponies. Equine are inherently dangerous, simply due to their size and prey animal mentality. For the safety of our animals and volunteers, volunteering is available only to students with a regular time slot. This ensures you're regularly educated on proper handling of our animals as well as offered appropriate opportunities for your help. When you're signed off on skills such as independent riding and handling, you'll get more saddle time, horse time, and the opportunity to do online and in person shows and clinics with our instructors instructor on our lessons horses!

As a regular student, you will build a bond with our animals. They'll get to know you and you'll get to know them, and you'll have a meaningful working relationship. Your instructor will have a good grasp on which horses are most appropriate for you, who your favorites are, and can make a long term lesson plan to bring you closer to your equine focused goals. We can plan for the animals to have days off and make sure their training stays in line with what they're offering in the program. A first time or irregular student is more emotional labor for an animal who doesn't yet have that bond and familiarity, equine are inherently introverts, new people are hard! A first time or irregular student needs accessing, paperwork, addition to the insurance, and a new lessons plan drawn up.

Offering a sliding scale or "package deals" to make equine education more accessible is something we would love to offer and consider quite frequently. Unfortunately, the process needed to ensure those price points are offered to those who truly need them is a long one. Instead, we offer a very low price compared to other equine education programs in the area as well as another deal. While your lesson price is your responsibility once you have a regular time slot (yes, even if you have to cancel for that week) your price point will also be "locked in" even as the economy changes and prices for new students go up. Yep, we still have students at the $50 price who've been with us for 6+ years! It's the best we can do while still providing an ethical life to our animals. However, please don't forget us when you can afford to help us help others. Tips and donations towards vet bills and feed and care cost go directly to the animals 100% of the time. Please consider adding when you can!

This is a very good question, HoofBeats Stable DID used to be a non-profit! We started as a business, and then became a non-profit for over 4 yrs. The hope was that we could get a solid donation base, allowing us to help more horses and offer more accessible price points to more people. Unfortunately, we found the opposite to be true. To bring in the donation base needed, we would need a full time writer, photographer, grant writer, and social media manager. Folks still treated HB as a business, trying to negotiate lower than low prices and failed to send their donation if they didn't show up for their lesson that day. We also found it much harder to establish credit and purchase necessities for our animals, such as transportation, feed credit, and a sanctuary space for our retired horses and ponies. Our executive director was overworked and coming apart at the seams. So we dropped the extra work of maintaining a non-profit. The mission is the same, offering more accessible equine educations, through rescue and rehabilitation!