06/07/2025
An important post to raise awareness of what it takes to offer Equine Assisted Services to our clients. EQuivalence is a beautiful organisation where meaningful therapeutic interventions take place - and it comes with a huge investment on the part of the therapists, facilitators, support staff, and most importantly, the horses themselves.
FREE HORSE THERAPY
I've had an email sitting in my inbox for a few days now. The sender explained that they are depressed, jobless, and eager to learn to ride horses and receive horse therapy, but they cannot afford it.
In the same week, I received a call from someone wanting to bring a foster child to the horses. The child has had a traumatic childhood, and the caller wants to help her somehow. However, when the costs are discussed, it becomes clear that they cannot afford it.
People love horses and want to volunteer their time to brush them, especially when they are going through tough times and just want to be around horses. However, volunteering does not cover the costs of keeping the horses, nor does it pay the person who needs to show you how to handle the horses safely and ensure you enjoy your time.
As someone who started this space to help people, make them feel good, and teach horsemanship, life skills, and other coping techniques alongside horses, receiving constant requests like this is challenging. You are constantly at odds with yourself, trying to figure out how you can help.
Let's look at some numbers:
HORSE KEEP AND YARD MAINTENANCE
Keeping 6-7 horses costs about R3500 per day. This includes three qualified, experienced facilitators, a groom, feed (roughage and supplementary feed), ad hoc vet costs, monthly vet costs, dentistry, farriery, maintaining facilities, rent, business administration like website maintenance, marketing, and supporting community children programs.
TRAINING FACILITATORS IN EQUINE ASSISTED THERAPY
In South Africa, there are no dedicated training institutions for Equine Therapy modalities. This means we need to look to overseas training programs like EAGALA, ARCH, Polyvagal Equine Institute, HPR, and Equimotional, which offer quality training in USD and Pounds. These trainings cost between R27000 and R50000, excluding travel expenses. Additionally, to remain affiliated with these institutions, you need to pay membership fees and keep up with CPD trainings over time.
Apart from training in Equine Assisted Therapy, each professional, whether a Mental Health or Equine Professional, needs to uphold their own South African standards within their scope of practice. This means that if you are a social worker, psychologist, or coach, you need to pay membership fees to South African boards and complete CPD courses (which also cost money) to maintain your qualification and accreditation.
As a facilitator, you hope and try to plan these trainings between sessions for your clients because if you do not offer sessions, you do not get paid. Sometimes, you end up unable to offer sessions, need to credit those sessions to the client, and pay for your training. So, training ends up costing you training costs, travel costs, and client costs.
NPO DOES NOT MEAN EVERYTHING IS FOR FREE
In the NPO sector, a lot of behind-the-scenes time is spent trying to find funders who understand your niche area, value it, and see it as worth investing their hard-earned money to further the passion for helping others through horses. You have to write different proposals to different companies. Once they show some interest, you have to go through hoops to complete paperwork, ensure all your financial records are 100% up to date, and enter the waiting game with loads of other NPOs whose causes are just as legitimate and in need of support as yours. Once money is allocated, you have to be able to note exactly where everything is going, with proof to keep it above board.
ALL OF THIS TAKES TIME… Time which is most often not paid for.
Even if you do not get funding, you still continue to offer free services to your program of choice. This takes up time you could allocate to income-generating services, but you choose not to, or you schedule it in your downtime to make ends meet.
THEN SOME MORE THAT GOES IN…
Taking all of the above into account, which can be explained in monetary terms, there is behind-the-scenes work that cannot. Research, training horses, planning sessions, conversations with clients outside session time, and liaising with different people from different industries to grow and expand your business.
With all of this, you still work alongside living beings who need to be horses. You have none of the above without them, yet everyone wants a piece of them. We need to create ways to keep them without them needing to be at the centre of it all the time, but what is the value in that? People rarely see the value of just brushing them. They need to be ridden, engaged with, and be everything to everyone on demand. No one who is not with them every day thinks of the toll human interactions have on them. When you start to stand up for them and keep boundaries, people see you as selfish.
So, to ask for free sessions from the get-go because you cannot pay for it… what must we, as people in the therapy service industry, do with that?
You want our mental health expertise, our equine expertise, our horses, and everything that comes with that… for free. We value our horses' time more than our own, and if you cannot at least offer to help pay for that hour you have with them, why should we add ours?
Or let’s ask the question differently… why should you not put monetary value on your own mental health? Do you go to the grocery store and say you are hungry but cannot pay? Or to the liquor store, but you cannot pay?
But that is probably it… people would rather pay for a box of wine than pay for therapy. If that is the case, you are probably not ready to work on your mental health. It takes grit, effort, honesty, understanding to value others and to work on yourself. It is hard work, but if you are willing to pay that money… in the long term, you will understand the investment.
