Stable Life, Inc.

Stable Life's mission is to promote recovery and enhance the quality of life for persons affected by mental illness through self-determination and empowerment, and through family and community education, acceptance, and support. Stable Life was founded in 2005 and has been building its programs.

Currently the equine program is experiencing an immense growth in participants and we have a lot of work to do to meet the need. Our facility has been started from scratch and we have several building and maintenance projects. We grow one project at a time and need assistance.

We have several areas of volunteer need:

• With our horses: We need horsey people who can help teach and train the horses and fine tune them for our EAA participants. We have a very open equine volunteer program and our philosophy is the more time you spend with the horses the better volunteer you'll be with our participants. We utilize the assistance of folks who have extensive horse experience as well as beginners.
• We seek people involved with veterinary school to put on clinics and learning sessions for our volunteers to show animal husbandry. We are looking for people who can give riding lessons to teach our ABLE Team kids (Adolescents Becoming Leaders and Equestrians) how to ride during our Volunteer Open Horse on Friday afternoons.
• We have several building / construction projects big and small. We can always use handy men and women to help us build things or maintain the property.
• We need trails cleaned up and wood and branches removed and stacked.
• We are always in need of people to help in the office with filing, organizing resources and brochures and logging our lending books and develop a lending library system.
• We need help with fund development, fund raising and marketing.
• We need a better volunteer program to meet the increase in participants.

Our organization provides peer run mental health services. We offer education opportunities and partner with professionals to enhance their training by including a person with lived experience. We provide education for people with mental illness and families of those affected by it. We modify our training materials to educate communities and agencies on the real face of mental illness and how we can better understand the needs of those affected by it.

We offer advocacy services within schools and Individualized Education Plans, within professional mental health services and within the service system. We advocate on a statewide level for systems change and are involved in several workgroups and initiatives around the state to improve mental health services. We provide direct support via our Equine Assisted Activity program and work with participants to improve their confidence and esteem as well as enhance coping and social skills. Our program targets children and adolescents and we also work with adults.