July Newsletter

Hi Everyone! Summer is finally here and we’re already in the thick of stable management courses with our junior riders!

We are so excited to be offering the new “Pony Stars” course for our junior riders. Pony Stars are designed for children aged 4 – 12 years and are a great package. Each child who books onto it gets a “Challenge book”, some cool stickers and sticker sheets, a drawstring bag to put all their Pony Stars equipment in and certificates/badges (don’t worry no sewing involved!) and a rosette when they complete their section. There are 4 different groups – Shetland Striders, Dartmoor Dazzlers, Welsh Wizards and Connie Champs with Shetland striders being the entry level and Connie Champs for our more experienced Juniors. You don’t need to start at entry level – we are planning that most of our Juniors will start at Dartmoor Dazzler level.

We are going to be running two Pony Stars weekly sessions – a Monday at 4.30p.m with Laura and a Saturday at 10.30 a.m with Liam. The sessions will cover the stable management and other practical skills sessions and then Juniors can be ticked off on their ridden achievements during their group lessons. If you would like your Junior to take part in Pony Stars, sessions cost £15 per hour and you can come each week, or just whenever you can manage. It’s great for building confidence in the wee ones and the best part is that there are much wider skills than horsemanship taught – there are badges for being kind, being environmentally friendly and being an animal lover so they are great after lockdown for helping get kids out in the fresh air and learning new life skills!

You can book in for the sessions by emailing or calling Ali and there is an initial one-off charge of £25 for the “starter pack” for each stage – we would anticipate each stage (e.g. Dartmoor Dazzlers) would take between 6 months and a year to achieve, depending on regularity of attendance.

MEMBERSHIP

A big thank you to all our members who were super organised with paying and returning their membership forms and fees, making our lives much easier at ARC! It was great to see our existing members take advantage of the discounted rate which we were delighted to offer as thanks for members support over the last 12 months during lockdowns.

SURVEY

Again, a huge thank you to all our members who took part in the survey – we had over 90 responses to the member one and 56 responses to the external stakeholder one, which is a really, really good response rate. The winner of the prize draw from survey entrants has now been advised that they were the lucky winner of the £100 voucher 😊

We now have a lot of work to do to collate all the information, but the feedback was hugely positive, and we have some great suggestions to look at for the future.

PRIVATE LESSON PLEA! As we’ve noted in a few previous newsletters this year, we know that the phone lines are really busy on “private lesson Monday” and we’re really grateful to members who contact us to make suggestions of different systems we could use to ensure members are not trying to get through on phone for so long.