January and the start of February at Gareloch RDA always start with a holiday for our horses, and a weekly training programme for our volunteers and participants. We like to cover a range of interesting equine and disability sport subjects, ensuring engaging sessions for our team. This year we featured refresher sessions for working with our participants, an Autism specialist presenting how best to work with our Neurodiverse attendees and a trip to the Police Scotland horses, among others.
Our sessions recommenced mid February, and everyone quickly got back into the swing of things. We had a coach in training qualify and start taking her own sessions, as well as restarting our well loved Tea With A Pony sessions.
At the first of these TWAP sessions, we had a lovely group of guests from a local care home, with one aged 101! They enjoyed a demonstration from one of our participants (who is also a volunteer!) as well as a horse meet and greet then tea and cake!
April was focused on development of our riders and drivers, and for a handful of riders, a chance to focus on learning their dressage tests for the upcoming West and Central Dressage Competition, which took place at the start of May.
6 of our riders, including some that had never competed before, made their way into Glasgow to compete against other riders in the dressage arena! The results were phenomenal with five 1st place rosettes and a 5th place, which was an amazing achievement as it was the riders first time on the horse and with the leader! What a brilliant young man!
We celebrated volunteers week, which ended with a few of our trustees being asked to attend the Volunteer of the Year awards for Argyll and Bute. Our group and volunteers were nominated in 6 categories! Testament to their incredible work.
We are now looking ahead to the second half of the year. We have our 2 week summer break coming up soon and are busy planning for our inaugural volunteer awards, as we continue to find ways to thank those that make our work possible!
I believe our next update is the start of January, but of course, if you would like to hear about our work in the meantime, I’m always happy to give an update! Here are a few photos from our volunteer outing to the police Scotland horses!
