There are programs that help young people from low-income communities learn to ride and there are programs to help those same students achieve success in the classroom.
Now a new non-profit organization in Maryland is marrying the two initiatives.
Saddle Up Scholars was founded early last year with a mission to provide tutoring, standardized test prep and academic coaching to children from underserved communities, while partnering with existing equestrian programs providing riding lessons to young people from Baltimore City and beyond.
Saddle Up Scholars is the brainchild of two veteran educators and horsewomen who met through an equine vet years ago. They discovered they had similar careers and interests but also recognized, as they say in their mission statement, “the power of education and the positive influence of horses” to help young people succeed.
“We said, let’s go into business and joked about it for years. We both wanted to know, what can we do to help the world at large?” said Win Lewis, who taught at Oldfields School in Baltimore County and was a professor at the Community College of Baltimore County.
For Towner the turning point came in 2018 with a student at Harford Community College, where she worked as an administrator.
Dominick Merritt was a shy first-year student from Baltimore. In an effort to draw him out of his shell, Towner, who was leading a student empowerment program at the college, asked him about his passions and he said, “thoroughbred racing.” When she pressed him for any specifics that he loved about racing, he said, “All of it.”
Towner recalls thinking at the time that she didn’t know much about racing, only that she too loved thoroughbreds, having owned and shown them.
But she wanted to help Merritt so she reached out to Chris and Kevin Boniface, owners of Bonita Farm, a thoroughbred breeding and training facility in Darlington, Maryland, to see if they might help.
Soon the Bonifaces welcomed Merritt at their farm and introduced him to hands-on horsemanship with a job mucking stalls and grooming horses.
One day a photo of Merritt in boots and hard hat astride one of the Bonifaces’ thoroughbreds landed in Towner’s Facebook message feed as she was sitting in an airport in Texas after receiving a national education award.
Seeing that image of her student sitting on a racehorse filled Towner with pride and helped drive her to quit her job and, with Lewis, start Saddle Up Scholars.
“It fueled my passion; combine the horse world with academic world. Horses put us on a path to success,” said Towner. “Of all my accomplishments that relationship, seeing him thrive, really meant the most for me.”
Both Lewis and Towner wanted to create an organization that improved learning skills and introduced young people to horses, with a core social justice mission to combat inequity.
In the past year, Saddle Up has partnered with The Schuster Foundation and Charm City Polo in Baltimore. There are about five Baltimore area farms that give riding lessons to low-income students through the foundation, which funds 1,000 riding lessons a year.
They’ve also partnered with Work to Ride in Philadelphia, the world-renowned equestrian outreach program.
At Saddle Up, Lewis and Towner are providing tutoring and academic coaching for about 25 students in Baltimore and Philadelphia. They stress the program targets not just students who need to improve their grades (Work to Ride requires a “C “ average to participate in its riding program) but also gifted students who need more of a challenge than they are getting at their schools.
“Some of the students are very bright, above grade level,” said Towner.
All of the education is virtual, Towner said, the benefit of pandemic funding that got Google Chromebooks into the hands of many public school students around the country. But they are also facing a student population that, like so many elsewhere, is struggling because of pandemic disruption.
Lewis and Toner say their goal is not only for kids to aspire to careers in the horse industry but to prepare a route to college.
“We’d like them to be able to go to college, be able to pay for riding and not feel marginalized,” said Lewis, herself a jumper rider who helps with her family’s thoroughbred breeding business.
Saddle Up wants to take its idea across the country and took its first step toward that goal by adding a new virtual tutoring site in Ocala, Florida to help displaced young people. Towner and Lewis make the point that not far from the lush farms of Florida horse country are people living in poverty. Their equestrian partner is Stirrups ‘n Strides therapeutic riding center in Citra, Florida.
Lewis and Towner have brought on board two inspirational young people to help further their mission. Intern Sophie Gochman was a top junior jumper rider who now attends Harvard University. Lewis tutored Gochman when she was in high school as part of a program for outstanding athletes who needed to study remotely in order to compete.
Gochman shook up the horse world four years ago when she penned a piece shortly after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, as his death touched off a national social justice movement. In it she took the equestrian community to task for being largely inaccessible to aspiring horsemen and women of color and turning a blind eye to society’s chronic inequities.
“She was concerned about leveling the playing field,” said Lewis. “We learn from our students.”
Even so, Towner and Lewis say they have seen and experienced generosity in the horse world, evidence there is a way forward to greater openness and inclusion.
In 2016 Towner was given the opportunity to show Britta of Berga, a world class jumper, at major venues from Florida to Vermont, thanks to the mare’s owners who saw they made a great match.
“I never would have had that opportunity otherwise,” she said. “We want to pay it forward.”
Today, six years after the Bonifaces opened the door to horse racing for him, Merritt is a full time exercise rider, traveling between Florida and New York with Todd Pletcher Racing. And he’s a mentor for students participating in Saddle Up Scholars.