Welcoming everyone to horses benefits people – and the industry

A scheme aimed at allowing more people to access horses and riding should also help riding schools – and the sector – become more commercially viable.

The British Horse Society (BHS) initiative Everyone Welcome is designed to do what it says on the tin; create an equestrian sector of which anyone can be part. BHS chief executive James Hick told H&H it brings together core aims of helping people and horses, increasing participation and supporting riding schools.

“Everyone welcome means just that,” the policy document states. “Whatever an individual’s ability, background, culture or identity, they are welcome to be part of our equestrian community. We will be all the better for being more diverse, equitable and inclusive – as a society and as a sector.”

Mr Hick said the scheme brings together different BHS initiatives. The Changing Lives Through Horses (CLTH) programme now involves more than 1,500 people at more than 129 riding schools. As well as helping those disengaged young people, this is estimated to put £2.5m back into riding schools annually.

The Career Transition Fund has helped people through BHS coaching exams to the tune of about £300,000 so far, also helping support the workforce, and the Coaching4All scheme helps those with some equine teaching qualifications to gain the extra skills to work with people who have additional needs. Key to working with riding schools is also not just providing funding but supporting them to apply for and secure other grants and revenue streams.

“When you pull those different aspects together, we now have our Everyone Welcome strategy, which at the heart has two aspects,” Mr Hick said. “One is how we support riding schools to be centres where people truly do feel welcome. Everybody can feel welcome.

“We can introduce groups of people who may never have thought riding or interacting with horses was for them, and we all know that if somebody has interacted with a horse of any type, they’re much more likely to advocate for us. So we need to bring people who are not normally advocates of horses into our world.

“Also at the heart of all of this is the philosophy of doing good, but also making it commercially viable, because all these initiatives have to bring commercial value to the riding schools to make them sustainable.”

Mr Hick said a pilot is running at 15 riding schools across the country, including Bolton-based Krimmz Girls Youth Club, an award-winning volunteer-run community sport group. Girls from the club enjoyed sessions at Wigan equestrian centre Thompson House last summer, and start again this month.

“We put a post up saying the riding will be starting again soon and had more than 100 applications from parents,” Krimmz director and lead volunteer Khadija Patel told H&H. “The original cohort want to progress and get better. They all say they value the importance of looking after the horses; it’s not just the riding, it’s everything that comes with it.”

Ms Patel said it was not just the cost that was a barrier for many people from very deprived areas; there were potential cultural and religious issues that have been remedied, such as ensuring the young Muslim girls had a female coach.

“They really value the whole experience,” she said. “They just don’t get these opportunities.”

Caroline Tomlinson runs pro-inclusion charity My Life Legacy from Thompson House; she had worked in the voluntary sector and taught riding, and was “delighted to bring my two careers together”.

Her aim is to allow as many people as possible to access equestrianism – she also offers the CLTH programme – so she was delighted to work with the BHS on the scheme.

“Riding can be seen as elitist, for people with lots of money, so we started to think about how we could do things differently, to welcome people who might have thought, ‘That’s not for me,’” she told H&H.

“The Krimmz group got a lot from it; this just opens the door and makes it accessible. It’s the welcoming approach I’d like to say we’ve always had. The horse world can be scary to get involved in but our heart is to promote inclusion for everybody. This is accessible for all; we look at how to bring in funding to make it fully accessible.”

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