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Cowboy-Up
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Cowboy-Up is dedicated to assisting troubled youth in our communities. In this particular youth program, we use horses to teach responsibility, respect, self-awareness, positive attitudes, positive choices, and manners. We also use the change in surroundings and expectations to instill in young people the idea that what they are accustomed to is not all that there is.
A camp program for young people, Cowboy-Up is designed as an alternative or adjunct to probation, community service, or juvenile hall. Small groups are brought to the site, are housed in dorms, and are taught basic horsemanship and animal husbandry. They will learn that a horse doesn't care who you think you are, and in order to work with them, they must treat the horses with care and with genuine respect.
Youth create bonds with horses much easier than with adults and authority figures. These unique bonds help to anchor the ideas and reinforce the behaviors that will be taught. With an emphasis on how these higher values and strong bonds relate to social interaction, many insightful concepts are imparted that will help them see the parallels in ordinary life.
Cowboy-Up is a change of environment, a change of circumstances, a change of context for struggling youth who are currently on the broad and well-marked path to Nowhere Good. Its purpose is to bring about a change of attitude, a change of heart, and hopefully a change of life
Salvaged Horses Salvaging Children
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Most of the horses used in the program have been adopted from Horse Rescue programs. These salvaged horses are rehabilitated and given the necessary training so that they can be of valuable service to our community. So that they may themsleves, in turn, help to salvage some of our wayward youth.
Cowboy-Up presents them with a change in environment, a change in activities, and hopefully with a change in viewpoint about themselves, their place in society and their chances for a brighter future.
There are many children being raised now in some pretty consistently dreadful environments. These kids tend to have a bleak and narrow view of the world. Fundamental to the continuation of this situation is the chronic reinforcement of negative behaviors by the things in the environments they are immersed in – by the people, by their regular activities, and by the often oppressive nature of their physical surroundings.
Why does little Susie take up smoking?
At some point, one of her friends probably admired the way she held the cigarette or the way she defied her parents… and boom! Little Susie, who is really just looking for some genuine admiration from people who care about her, finds herself suddenly with a dangerous, expensive and unhealthy habit.
Susie does not understand that she craves admiration and that admiration can be used by others to manipulate her. In Cowboy-Up children are taught to recognize when someone is using admiration or flattery in order to get them to make poor or harmful choices.
Why does young Jimmy decide to assault his classmate?
Because doing so will earn him the admiration of his friends, classmates... maybe even his parents.
When these negative behaviors are reinforced daily or hourly by the unrelenting admiration of the significant people in a child’s life, they come to be seen as good, proper and normal. Life becomes oriented around these things to an unhealthy degree. This is all these kids know.
You understand what we are talking about here. These kids are destined for or are already in juvenile hall, and for far too many of them, this road leads to a bleak existence. Worse, more and more nowadays it leads to a long sentence in prison, from which they can expect to emerge permanently damaged in ways that are nearly impossible to repair.
In all likelihood, you and I will end up paying $31,500 per year for many of these kids. That’s the annual cost of a prison bed in our state.
The sad thing though, of course, is not the money. It is the loss of that child's light.
So many millions of our children have followed this path already. The prisons are full to bursting. New ones cannot be built fast enough. Something must be done to stem this rising dismal tide. These children have little or no chance at all to break away from these environments, to take a positive balancing step to the side and look at themselves in a new context, to see things as they might be instead of how they are and always have been.
How much is your youth worth?
Cowboy-Up is a program that takes horses that are adopted from horse rescue programs and puts them into service assisting the most important sector in our community: our troubled youth.
Please help us bring the Cowboy-Up program to fruition.
To assist us with financial support, please click below to make a donation.
We also need volunteers and staff. If you would like to help, please Contact Us. Mention in your email to our coordinator that you are interested specifically in Cowboy-Up.