‘The horse is the teacher’: Group empowering women and children with horses
A program in the Northeast aims to empower women and children through the relationships with horses.
Although this program isn’t about teaching participants how to ride horses. In fact, they don’t ride the horses at all.
Shannon Dickey and Barbie Harder are facilitators who run Empower U Equine, an assisted learning program outside Nipawin which helps those who join develop life skills by personal interactions with horses — face to face, and on the ground.
“We aren’t a program that’s necessarily targeting horse people,” Dickey told northeastNOW. “We’re targeting people in general to teach life skills. People come to us, we guide them through a series of exercises, they’re then partnered with a horse, and in our program the horse is the teacher and we’re the facilitators.