Fieldstone Farm Therapeutic Riding Center is an equine-based therapy facility serving people with mental and physical disabilities. It is a not-for-profit organization that employs about thirty staff members and is supported by over 250 volunteers who assist instructors with riding and carriage driving lessons which serve over 500 students.

I recently had the pleasure of making portraits of a dozen or so staff members who do much of the heavy lifting of providing daily care for the 36 horses used in the program. These are the people who take care of feeding, administering medications, monitoring the health of the horses and doing all the hard work of cleaning stalls, providing water and taking care of repairs and maintenance of the large barn and 80-acre grounds. It is a monumental task and without the work of this group of dedicated individuals, the program simply couldn’t function at anything like its current level.

The portraits were assembled into a 30X40 inch poster which now hangs next to the tack room door. Within days of hanging the poster, we observed a significant improvement in the frequency and quality of interactions between the barn staff and the volunteers, instructors, students and everyone else who passes through the tack room door.