One Heart Equestrian Therapy is a program made up of volunteers, therapeutic riding and driving instructors, and therapists who dedicate their time to helping improve the lives of others in a very unique way.

“What we do basically, the nutshell, we offer therapeutic services to people with disabilities using horses” said Kris Lager, who founded One Heart in 2001.

For the last seventeen years, One Heart has been on the move. Up until now it has not had a permanent home to service their clients and care for their horses.

“We have been hosted around the county for seventeen years, with that we had to bring things into the arena and move them for the other people who use it,” Lager said.

One Heart’s journey started at the Story County fairgrounds in Nevada. Then in 2002, just one year after being founded, they met their goal of putting their first rider up on One Heart’s first donated horse, Rosie. Since then Rosie has been a part of their family, and in 2013 she was named Therapy Horse of the Year for the American Morgan Horse Association.

All of the horses that One Heart uses are donated and must go through a trial period to determine if they are right for this special and demanding job.

“This is the hardest job I’ve ever seen a horse do mentally,” Lager said.

While observing the horses, Lager looks for many things. The biggest one being the horses temperament and how they react to an unpredictable environment and large groups of volunteers. Next she takes into consideration their size and health.

“They have to have the ability to adapt to one, the environment of their work place, they have to tolerate an unbalanced and unpredictable rider, they have to be able to work with an army of volunteers throughout the week,” Lager said.

One Heart isn’t just a home for the horses, it is also a therapeutic center which requires lots of consideration and specialty equipment to properly serve their riders. Every aspect of the rider’s experience has been taken into account, from how they can enter and exit the facility to the shapes and textures they may come across.

“We never advertise for a client, we don’t dare, there’s no possible physical way we could serve everybody that would qualify for our services, we are constantly recruiting for volunteers,” Lager said.

The specialty items required to properly accommodate One Hearts’ riders rely heavily on donations. Almost everything they use in their sessions was donated or purchased using donations from friends and the community.

“The handles are different textures, sizes, shapes, there are knobs there are different kinds of orientations then you also look at trying to create an atmosphere of independence to the highest level for our riders,” Lager explains as she points out the special additions to the helmet lockers that were an eagle scout project done for One Heart.

The purchase of One Heart’s first permanent home allows more ways they can help and entertain their clients.

In one room, Lager has plans to create a sensory controlled area for their riders who are on the autism spectrum, a space where those riders can prepare for their classes.

“We will serve their needs, [so] they can be out of the fray and prepare for their lesson,” Lager said.

One Heart offers four different levels of therapeutic riding and as a member of PATH International, the Professional Association of Therapeutic Horsemanship, they must follow all of the PATH standards.

The first level of classes with ages two to five must be accompanied by a physical therapist while in the arena, as do their medically fragile riders. Then they have a developmental class for riders who are not physically handicapped but may have learning disabilities, this group is not learning to ride the horses instead they are performing their therapeutic activities on the back of a horse. They also offer adaptive riding for clients who are learning to ride and take care of their horses, Lager explained.

Having their own location and control over their own hours is something that is new to One Heart, this new level of privacy allows them to offer a whole new level of care for their riders.

“One of the things about having our own home is the autonomy allows us to offer mental health services, there is a distinct level of privacy that you need to be able to do counseling and other mental health services. We didn’t have that at the Story County fairgrounds…but here we do,” Lager said.

One Heart has many plans and projects for the future, they have a busy winter ahead of them as they would like to have the property all ready for their spring sessions.

“Then [we will] really start focusing on our projects for next year, it’s everything we thought and more (this new location)…when they come back in the spring we will expect to have the place designed and create a permanent home,” said Lager.

Lager’s plans don’t stop after this coming spring, her overall goals for One Heart are much bigger.

“My last vision for One Heart is that not only would we become a premier accredited center but we would also be recognized in the field of research and therapeutic activities using horses, we have the resources in this county that could support tremendous amounts of research…the research necessary to carry our industry into the future,” Lager said.

Published research would mean big things for the equestrian therapeutic industry, it would allow programs like One Heart to become more mainstream and appreciated as a form of therapy.

“Therapeutic riding is not widely recognized by any insurance as a payable thing, with the proper research approach, documentation then what we see in the arena could be presented to the insurance companies and I think that they would receive it well, so that could be One Heart’s contribution long term,” said Lager.