The Medicine Horse Center in Mancos held a volunteer workshop on Saturday morning.
The Center needs volunteers for therapeutic riding sessions, helping out as side walkers and leaders for children and adults with special needs.
The center was founded in 1999 and is a nonprofit charity.
The charity seeks to help people by using experiential learning through equine assisted therapy.
“We do assisted riding,” Lynne Howarth, executive director, said. “We do experiential learning working with school districts, with the youth at risk in social and emotional learning and also psychotherapy, so lots of things to help people, with horses as our helpers.”
Almost everyone who attended the workshop was new to equine assisted psychotherapy, but not to horses.
“I think we benefit from them (the new volunteers),” Howarth said. “They seem like great people from all different walks of life and they will learn as they go.”
This was the first workshop for this group of volunteers.
“We do continual trainings over time,” Howarth said. “This is kind of the introduction to what we do and we keep training beyond that.”