New year, new equine team members!

As 2025 gets going we thought it was time to let everyone know about updates to our equine team members, with a few comings and goings we are excited about.

First of all, we wanted to make sure everyone knows that Marcus has gone on to a well-deserved retirement after years spent giving lessons to hundreds of adults and children, and helping them learn to ride. We are so grateful to him for being such a superstar as he heads out into the fields to enjoy himself after so many years of hard work.  

We are also extremely pleased to be able to welcome our newest ponies and horse to Stable Life, and we can’t wait for you to meet them.

First up is Rascal, a 12hh 19-year-old Welsh mountain pony who has a big personality and has already proved himself to be a perfect pony for beginner’s riding lessons for kids – come and say hello, he’ll be so pleased to meet you!

Rascal is a 12.2hh Welsh mountain pony - just look at those ears!

Secondly we have another brilliant new pony who is a huge asset to the team here, our traditional Gypsy Cob Kingsley who is a lovely chestnut sabino and stands 14.2hh. Kingsley is friendly and kind and loves his cuddles so as you can imagine he is fitting right in here.  

Kingsley is a friendly and gentle Traditional Gypsy Cob

Finally last, but definitely not least, is our newest arrival Beau. A gentle giant standing 17.2hh tall, Beau is a pure-bred Shire Horse who has been living at a farm on the east coast and been used for breeding. Now, at 12 years old she has been broken in by her previous owner and is proving to be a firm favourite among the staff already; we can’t wait to get her out on lessons and hacks. Given her size she’ll also be able to carry larger riders than most of our ponies and horses are able to.

Gentle giant Beau is a stunner and keen to get started meeting everyone!

Beau has fitted right in with all the other ponies here at Stable Life and she can't wait to meet her public!

If you want to book a hack in the beautiful Scottish Borders countryside or a riding lesson with us, please take a look at our calendar on Ecpro to see what’s coming up. We will also be putting out our Easter and half-term timetables as soon as they are finalised. We look forward to seeing you all soon.

Vote for Stable Life with your blue token at Tesco!

We have had brilliant news this month, that Stable Life has been selected as one of the community groups for the next round of Tesco’s Stronger Starts scheme.  Stronger Starts provides grant awards of up to £1,500 to local community projects, with a particular focus on children and young people.

Stable Life is one of three groups which have been shortlisted to receive an award this January, and as of this week Tesco customers at Tesco Extra in Paton Street in Galashiels can now vote for the group they think should take away the top award while they shop, and we ask that you use your blue token to vote for us!  All three shortlisted candidates will receive funding, but the organisation with the most votes will win the top prize of £1,500.

Mags Powell, Chief Executive at Stable Life commented: “Being included in the shortlist for Stronger Starts means Tesco believes that the services we offer at Stable Life have a positive impact in our community, which is something we see here every day. Our referrals are increasing as mental health services struggle to meet demand, and this extra funding would mean we can plan to offer even more help to vulnerable individuals in 2025. So please do vote with your tokens until January!”

Tesco’s Stronger Starts – previously known as Tesco Community Grants - has already provided over £110 million to more than 60,000 projects across Britain. The grant programme, delivered in partnership with Groundwork UK, helps schools and children’s groups provide nutritious food and healthy activities that support young people’s physical health and mental wellbeing, such as breakfast clubs or snacks, and sports equipment for after school clubs.

Graham Duxbury, Groundwork’s UK Chief Executive, added: “As a community charity, we have seen first-hand how schools and other groups supporting young people have been playing a much bigger role in ensuring children are getting a healthy start to the day and getting access to spaces and services to support physical activity and mental health.”

Olympic fever: How sport can help with mental health

As Team GB continues to win an incredible haul of medals at the Paris Olympics, (not least in the equestrian disciplines!) Stable Life reflects on how sport can help those struggling with their mental health

As we watch so many of Team GB winning medals in Paris, from Tom Daley to Adam Peaty to Tom McEwen, Ros Canter, and Laura Collett, and Ben Maher, Scott Brash and Harry Charles, we all feel justifiably proud of all these talented individuals, and the teams behind them, who made these brilliant results possible.

Here at Stable Life we salute each and every one of Team GB, and it’s been a joy to see how much the participants, from Bryony Page to Bethany Shriever, just obviously love what they do. And now is also a great time to reflect on just how much sport can have a positive influence on people’s lives.

Back in 2020, along with seven other Sport for Change organisations, Stable Life was successful in securing funding for five years to deliver our Healing Hooves project through Comic Relief’s Ahead of the Game UK programme. The focus was improving mental health outcomes through combining sport based approaches and quality mental health support.

The Healing Hooves project sees Stable Life working in partnership with Inspire Youth and G10 Sports to deliver a programme focused on holistic well-being for young people in the Scottish Borders who experience poor mental health. We use a combination of equine facilitated wellness, horse riding, psychotherapy and fitness to build mental wellness, resilience, core strength, social skills and confidence in our young people.

Over the last four years, we have been proud to work alongside the seven other organisations involved in the project, as well as a specialist sport and social impact consultancy, to help us to pool together our experiences, challenges, frustrations and findings, which have now been collated and published into the Ahead of the Game UK Learning Report which came out in 2023, and is designed to support organisations keen to build more intentional mental health support into their sport for change programmes.

The report produced a number of key findings which could be valuable to any organisation working in mental health:

1. Sport can build community instead of dependency and tackle underlying causes of social exclusion and isolation by building safe and diverse networks of support.

2. Sport interventions create different and often more familiar, safer cultural contexts which can mitigate the barriers to entry associated with mental health. Sport can therefore become an important entry point for a more specialist support.

3. Sport can focus on building positive mental health and habits, instead of tackling negative mental health. In cases where there is a clear and substantial diagnosis, it can still create environments where that stigma is minimised.

There were also some very interesting findings from the point of view of the organisations taking part, around the challenges of delivering programmes which really work for the participants. Four recommendations which came out of the work were:

• Mental health and wellbeing should not be viewed in isolation: often the cause of poor mental health is societal, e.g. structural inequalities and social isolation. This is how people experience their mental health, and so it needs to be acknowledged and tackled within the societal context in which it emerges, rather than parcelled up as some individual deficiency.

• This can be challenging, because sport-for-change programmes that seek to improve mental health are working within a system that often treat individuals in isolation. For example, funded partners observed that some existing frameworks for mental health treatment did not work and should be challenged – there are insights and perspectives that sport people can offer that show that clinical approaches are not always working.

• Understanding these complex dynamics is crucial to developing effective sport interventions that are culturally sensitive, inclusive, and accessible.

• This should be reflected in staff training and appointment. Programmes should be run by staff who understand the challenges faced by participants, either by lived experience or clearly acquired cultural competencies. Having staff who reflect the community and have “expertise by experience” was considered an important asset.

Toolkit

A toolkit has also been developed to provide some practical tips and recommendations for organisations to enable them to move toward an intentional approach that designs for mental health and wellbeing and achieves concrete outcomes that can be measured. The toolkit highlights the following requirements:

• The need for a compassionate and inclusive approach to mental health and wellbeing

• The need for successful partnerships and referrals

• The need for sustainable engagement and impact  

The toolkit also recommends a series of steps which include planning, developing a theory of change and collaborating with the right people and organisations – partnerships are crucial. The document also points out that safety is paramount, as individuals may not have had positive interactions with various services in the past, so developing a space where people feel safe is essential to mental health provision which works.

Authors Alison Carney and Kat Craig also say that continual reflection and ongoing learning are essential to developing a successful programme, both for participants and for the staff and volunteers within the project. Measuring outcomes or progress is an important way of tracking how the programme is delivering outcomes for individuals, and the toolkit has a wealth of examples from different organisations of the various ways this can be carried out.

All of this makes sense to us here at Stable Life: we recognise some of these challenges and have been pleased to absorb the learnings from other organisations we have been working with on the Ahead of the Game project. The main takeaway, overall, has been how powerfully sport can instigate positive change within individuals – this is something we see regularly in our project and the reason we’re here doing what we do.