Mike Sandell was out of his usual element. He emerged from the backseat of a Champagne-gold Suburban, scanning the terrain. He was in the rolling hills of rural Canby, at a ranch where groves of cottonwood, alder and Douglas fir dot an expansive and well-manicured lawn.
As he stood at the foot of Heron Hill, he spotted two Arabian thoroughbreds paddocked on the hillside and made his way toward them. As the 20-year-old trudged up the slope, he relied heavily on a walking cane to alleviate the torn meniscus in his right knee – an injury he says he sustained climbing carelessly onto a bunk bed in a homeless shelter.
Three years earlier, when Sandell was 17, social workers removed him from his parents’ home near Los Angeles and placed him with his grandmother in Newberg. Six months later he found a rent-free place to live in Beaverton. It was his ticket out of the small town, which he says, “sucks.”
The living situation didn’t last and the space he’d occupied at his grandmother’s had since been filled. He was able to find employment as a substitute educator, working with kids in special education programs, but it wasn’t enough money to get him into housing.
According to U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s annual report to Congress in 2014 , 60 percent of Oregon’s 1,096 unaccompanied homeless youth were sleeping outside on a single night in January that year, but Sandell wasn’t among them. He had found a new home in Portland’s crowded homeless shelters.
It was at a shelter in downtown Portland that Sandell noticed stickers plastered all over the walls and bunk beds depicting p:ear ’s logo. “What’s p:ear?” he asked his bunkmates. “It’s this great art space, you should come check it out,” someone replied. “The rest,” says Sandell, “is history.”
p:ear, an acronym for project: education, art, recreation, is a nonprofit in downtown Portland providing homeless youth with opportunities to explore their creative sides, go on field trips in nature. It’s also a place to feel normal again and to play games like Magic and Dungeons and Dragons like other kids their age.
The 2015 Point-In-Time count found on one night in January, in Multnomah County alone, there were 266 unaccompanied youth ages 24 and younger and an additional 369 children living with families who were experiencing homelessness.
At p:ear, about 900 homeless and transitional youth between the ages of 15 and 24 come through its doors each year.
In December, p:ear began to shuttle youth from downtown Portland to The Center at Heron Hill in Canby, a horse ranch where certified therapists use activities with horses to foster healing within clients through its Alliance Counseling program.
Equine therapy programs have been rising in popularity for decades. According to Alliance Counseling and Center at Heron Hill co-owner and director Joyce Korschgen, there are at least 50 equine therapy providers in the area surrounding Portland.
But she’s the first to offer a program specifically for homeless youth – a program she and Robinn Rudd, her partner in life and in business, are offering pro bono to homeless youth in Portland through p:ear.
As Sandell approached the paddock, a fenced enclosure for horses, a bay-colored beauty sauntered up to the fence and nickered a greeting as he began to gently stroke her neck and snout. “I wish I knew your name,” Sandell said to her. Today was his first visit to the ranch.
MerriBeth Vaughn, the certified equine specialist facilitating activities with p:ear, says while horse therapy can be extremely beneficial to any disenfranchised group – it doesn’t require a lot of talking – she’s noticed it’s especially effective with the kids from p:ear.
“They get around the horses and you can just feel the tension go out of everybody that’s in there,” she says. “They all seem like they just give a sigh of relief once they start petting the horses.”
Brandon Houston discovered Center at Heron Hill when he visited the ranch for a class he was taking at Lewis & Clark Graduate School. At the time he’d been a volunteer mentor at p:ear for about one year, and he says he knew the program could really help the homeless youth he was working with. He inquired with Korschgen and she agreed.
“Street kids,” he says, “they’re hyper-vigilant – watching for the cops – just everyone that walks by. They feel ashamed. For them to come here and not be surrounded by that is very helpful.”
Horses have the ability to pick up on human emotions, noticing minuscule facial expressions and movements, says Vaughn, and they often mirror whatever the human they’re interacting with is feeling. The way people react to approaching, guiding and gaining the trust of a 1,000-pound animal also plays an important role, she says.
Cody Surratt, 25, has come to the ranch with p:ear several times, and was happy during the second session when the same horse he’d worked with the first time sought him out.
“Horses tend to have very apparent body language that is usually pretty deliberate and straightforward,” says Surratt. He says at first he “didn’t quite get it,” but he soon realized that by observing and analyzing the horse’s behavior in cooperation with his own behavior, he came to an understanding of mutual trust with the horse.
“It happens a lot, that people who have survived traumas, end up having deep trust issues and other issues that are stigmatized in our society as something dirty that makes people broken and needs to be hidden,” says Surratt. “It seems that equine therapy subtly subverts an immediate reaction of distrust towards something by using a very large and noticeable example like a horse. Gaining a mutual trust with something like that can really be comforting.”
Korschgen explains she and other therapists at the ranch use a combination of Equine Assisted Growth and Learning Association (EAGALA) techniques and their own customized exercises.
“A lot of what we do involves metaphor, so when a person is grooming a horse, or is petting or taking the tangles out of the mane, we might ask them about the other tangles in their lives, or ‘What is the dust or dirt that is coming up for you as you do that?’”
After intake, Sandell sat down in the stable and selected a brush from a collection of grooming tools. The theme this day: self care. He wrote down examples of self care on a piece of paper, and taped it to the brush. Then the group moved out to the center’s enormous covered arena, and Sandell used the same brush to groom an Arabian mare named In Harmony.
The goal is to complete a roughly six-month therapy program with each youth, but so far attendance has been spotty – which is always a challenge when working with homeless youth, says Nathan Engkjer, p:ear’s Wilderness Recreation and Transition Coordinator. He plans to grow the program to also include ecotherapy activities such as gardening, archery and trail building, also offered on the 36-acre ranch.
The relief he says it brings to the youth who participate makes the challenge of getting a bunch of street kids into p:ear’s Suburban for the 45-minute drive south once a month completely worthwhile.
“There’s a lot more laughter on the ride home,” he says.
emily (at) streetroots (dot) org
