Funds received - £4,090
In December 2019 Eat Sleep Ride CIC received £4090 in funding for a Volunteers Coordinator because the demand exceeded our capacity. The role included supporting and inducting our junior and senior volunteers, maintaining health and safety as well as ensuring they understood their roles whilst at Eat, Sleep, Ride. This empowered our volunteers to feel more confident and work well within a team and use their own initiative. The role coordinated our volunteers so they were able to take part in our skills and accreditation programmes and outdoor projects which where crucial when Lockdown happens and we were able to help the community recover from some of the mental health impacts of COVID. The pandemic impacted everyone’s live in just a few weeks, life as we knew it changed beyond recognition, the funding to have someone in post to coordinate and support our volunteers has been invaluable and we have grown from 35 volunteers to 71 since March 2020.
Eat Sleep Ride considered it important to provide the opportunity for youths to gain awards as the children/youths were becoming increasingly lonely, less motivated, less confident and lacked being challenged both mentally and physically, because of lockdown.
Some of the projects coordinated:
• 19 young people were put through formal British Horse Society Challenge Awards and funded the capability to do that online. This gave these young people something to work to and focus on, during a period when schools were closed and there was a lack of activities and goals for them to focus on.
• 11 families where able to take part in a nature therapy project. The attendees took part in a range of activities at our new site, focused on working outdoors, understanding the ecology and environment around them, as well as learning new skills and building feeling of achievement. The groups planted trees, built compost toilets, learned about plant management and helped to build cross country score. The average evaluation out of 10 for the attendees was 9.57, so a very successful set of workshops
• 11 Children/Youths aged between 10 and 16 years have completed their Hi 5 Challenge with Eat Sleep Ride CIC.
• Over 2000 Saltire hours have been submitted since March and 15 Young people are signed up
Case Study example
T is a 14 year old is a regular rider, a volunteer and also a yard assistant with Eat, Sleep, Ride.
They are a NEET and have a long-term health condition in the home.
T has also disclosed challenges with depression, anxiety and self-esteem.
This year they completed the British Horse Society Challenge Project.
Currently they are participating in 5 other ESR projects:
Take the Reins
Saltire
ABRS Equitation
Rein & Shine (Our in house volunteering)
You can see that for this respondent the only area to drop is “I feel like I am part of a team/community”
In the second survey T did say they would like to have more team-based activities.
This would need to be looked at by ESR. It may be due to the restrictions from Covid-19 as the surveys both took place during the lockdown period.
You can see large improvements in indicators around being supported to learn a new skill and “when I speak people listen and understand”
It is great to see improvement in both feeling safe and healthy
After each project all of our children/youths expressed a strong interest in completing another challenge in the future.
