Hi Oaks Ranch Family! So nice to connect with you all! We have so many updates from this past year!! I don’t even know where to begin! …But now that I have written this newsletter, here are the main Topics:
 Sessions For starters, we are now fully up and running within our current capacity! In July of 2024 we had our first official participant in the program who was not a friend of a friend or there to help us test it. This client showed great progress during the program and then came back again in 2025 for another round of sessions! Since then we have had a full schedule and waitlist! This past spring we had 5 session clients per week for individual sessions, which is the most sessions we have ever offered at once, and it has been SO much fun to watch growth and healing take place! Welcome Intern Karissa In Spring 2025 we welcomed our first Intern, Karissa! Karissa has been an amazing addition to the team and has both co-lead sessions as well as leading some on her own! Karissa did our internship program for credit at her college where she recently graduated with a bachelors of psychology, and she has plans to pursue her doctorate and continue helping people walk through healing!! Congratulations Karissa! And Thank you for all you do for the horses and people at Oaks! Our Internship program is up and running and we are excited to welcome another intern for the fall 2025 session season! Stay Tuned! Volunteer Days  Another cool update is that in August 2024 we started doing volunteer days in the community and since then we have volunteered over 30 hours at local organizations! Since August 2024, our team has helped with cleaning stalls and brushing and spending time with horses, we restored an overgrown round pen, set up panel fencing in horse stalls, and prepped stalls for equine evacuations during the natural disasters in December and January! This team has been such an honor to work alongside! One of our core values is helping the community and community volunteer days have helped us do just that! Thank you to our volunteers! You guys are the BEST and you have made such an impact for local horses in need! If anyone would like to join our volunteer days, you can sign up on our website under the Lend a Hand tab! We currently have two monthly volunteer days, one where it is adults only, and one where kids can participate! Reach out if you want to be part of these! Read more about one of our volunteer days in this article from the Humane Society! Saddle Donations  In December 2024 we received a donation of 12 English Saddles from an anonymous donor with the intention that we could resell them to raise money for the nonprofit! Thanks to this donation, volunteers were able to raise $500 for the nonprofit and when we still had saddles leftover and heard about the donation drive going on for those who had lost tack in the Palisades fires, we donated the rest of the saddles so they could be distributed to those in need! Thank you Laura Canty for coordinating this effort! ZOW - Zones of Wellness Mental Health Event  This year on May 3rd we participated in our first ever pop-up event! We attended ZOW or Zones of Wellness put on by Childhood Matters and had a booth with a special horse-session-inspired craft where we had participants color how one negative emotion feels and how one positive emotion feels on either side of a little wooden horse, then we practiced acknowledging and accepting both by saying “I feel ___ and that’s okay” it was pretty powerful! We also practiced being mindful and in the moment and talked about the importance of meeting our emotions with kindness and curiosity. Birthday Fundraiser and Monthly Donors This year for our 3-YEAR-OLD Birthday we asked people to donate $10 or become a $10 monthly donor because our Birthday is Feb 10th! Well, most people donated far more than $10 and we ended up raising $1,475, gained three new monthly donors and one donor even updated their monthly gift! We were floored!! Thank you everyone who participated! Poncho’s Pancakes and Stories from Oaks Restorative Ranch  In the summer of 2024 Jubilee, one of our youth volunteers, and I started writing a fun story about Poncho: It was Luna’s Birthday, and Poncho wanted to do something special for her… So he ends up making pancakes! How fun! We worked on this story for over 6 months and then sent the storyboard to my cousin Abby to see if she would illustrate it for us! Poncho’s Pancakes is finally here and is available to purchase on amazon! Any money made from the book will go directly back to helping support our mission of walking through healing with people, horses, and the community! Poncho’s Pancakes is the first book of a greater series that I am calling “Stories From Oaks Restorative Ranch”. This series gives anyone who has been to the ranch an opportunity to share their story and experience! This means volunteers, session participants, and more! This is a creative way to raise awareness of both the program and the change we have experienced here! Poncho’s Pancakes is the first book, and we already have another one in the works for next year! If you would like to share your story of your time at the ranch, please let me know! Looking Ahead So much has happened in the past year and continues to happen and we have big plans and dreams for what comes next! We are actively seeking our own space, as we are feeling the need to be able to offer more sessions to people, host volunteer groups and trainings, and help more horses. (We currently have a waiting list for sessions! Isn’t that wild??) In January, we were offered three different horses for the program and just this month we were offered two more. Having our own space would allow us to help horses like these ones. Having a consistent horse or two that stays on property while we help other rescue horses would help create a feeling of safety and stability for our session clients as they come for sessions. In order to do all of this we will need our own space with room for 3 or more horses and that ideally has a round-pen, an arena, and is relatively quiet and peaceful. (We can also build these things together as a community if needed!) We have some feelers out for another temporary location, but we are also keeping our ears open for something that could be more permanent as well! Don’t worry though! We are still hanging out with Luna and Poncho for sessions and don’t have any plans to stop loving on them, too! How You Can Help - Time to Grow Campaign As some of you may remember, I started grad school in January of 2024 studying University of San Diego’s Masters of Science in Nonprofit Leadership and Management. As my Capstone project I set out to answer the question of “How can we expand the program” and I proposed two ideas: Find our own space and rescue a horse or offer sessions out of local ranches and rescues (which would be an expansion of what we are doing now). I sent out surveys to 25 individuals and interviewed local equine professionals to collect feedback on each idea. While I received support for both options, people agreed that while our own space is the ultimate goal, we do not have the finances necessary to support this option, yet. One survey respondent posed the idea of, what if we create a fundraising campaign for renting our own space and rescuing a horse and just see what we can raise? So we did just that! While we are still working toward launching it, we are creating the Time to Grow Roots campaign so we can build toward having our own space. For this campaign we are encouraging people to either donate, or share it with local businesses so they can participate! One larger company could make a big dent in our goal! (Imagine what three could do!) Here is the link to our fundraising campaign: https://www.zeffy.com/donation-form/growing-roots (You all are getting the first look at it! Please let me know if you have any feedback for the form!)  There are many other ways you can join us on this journey as well! You can join us on our community volunteer days, share about the program with your friends, be on the lookout for a space we can grow into, or even become a monthly donor!
We just wanted to take a minute to thank EVERYONE who has supported us this far; our team, our volunteers, those who have interacted with our posts, and those who have donated! YOU are what is making this possible, and we can’t thank you enough! Please reach out anytime, or comment any questions below! I am excited to be doing this TOGETHER! Kali Brooks Founder and Executive Director of Oaks Restorative Ranch
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