January Newsletter 2026

Happy New Year everyone and welcome to the January newsletter! We are certainly starting the New Year with plenty of snow to challenge us as you can see from the pictures above!

THANK YOU!

Firstly a big thank you to everyone who supported the Bronze Leadership groups fundraiser in early December – the group did brilliantly organising the event and made just over £600 for their chosen charity (Face youth UK) through a combination of the raffle, hobby horse jumping and some lovely things that the young people had made to sell on the evening – so a big well done to them and a big thank you to all our members!

Thank you also for the amazing amount of carrots, apples, treats and goodies that were left for the school horses and ponies under the tree – along with the huge amount of chocs, biscuits and sweets for the staff! It was very generous of you all and very much appreciated!

SNOW SNOW SNOW!

At the time of writing this, we are getting a fairly unusual amount of snow in Aberdeen! We have cancelled a good few days of lessons now as we never encourage members to drive when the weather conditions are challenging and we are going to keep assessing until Thursday 8^th Jan and if it looks unlikely that weekend sessions can go ahead, we will look to put on some online sessions for both our younger and adult members to keep giving you your horsey fix! Many thanks to the members who have responded to our Facebook posts about cancelled lessons and let us know that they have received voicemail messages e.t.c. – it makes our job much easier when we have to make contact with quite a few riders!

VIDEO GROUP

Snow and cancelled sessions means quite a drop in income for the club, so we are going to try to resurrect the Facebook video group that we did in Covid, which members can subscribe to for a small fee and we post educational videos that members can then access at any point. We have updated the club Facebook page to detail this and are happy to take any suggestions by members either via the Facebook page or by email to lessons@aberdeenridingclub.com We can do a huge range of educational videos from how to put on a bridle through to equine first aid, pole distances and other types of ridden or groundwork exercises so if there is something that you are keen to learn about, then drop us an email or comment and we will do our best!

EDUCATIONAL SESSIONS

We had to cancel the educational sessions we were running in December due to weather and then having picked a bad date as everyone was out partying! So the lunging session will now be running on Friday 16^th January from 5.30p.m – 7.00p.m and the young horse/groundwork session on Friday 30^th January from 5.30p.m – 7.00p.m.

The lunging session will cover lunge equipment, why we lunge, how to lunge and then time for everyone attending to have a shot at lunging – so this session is suitable for anyone 12 years old and over and we will also be chatting through lunging issues and how to ensure horses are polite on the lunge. Madge and Neco will be the horses that will be letting everyone practice their lunging.

The young horse/groundwork session is again suitable for anyone 12 years and over. We will be using Madge (who is a 4 year old) and covering groundwork and ridden work to show how we train a horse to ensure they are happy in their work and have great manners for being handled/mounted e.t.c. It’s a great opportunity for members to see both the work that goes into producing a horse for the riding school, but also for liveries and potential horse owners to learn a bit more about horse psychology and how handling techniques transfer over to how horses behave when ridden.

EXCITING PROJECT MARIO NEWS!

As our members are aware, we ran a really successful pilot project to increase participation in equestrian by underrepresented groups from August – Oct 2025. We partnered up with the brilliant Befriend a Child charity who referred a group of young people onto the programme – the young people were all from low socio-economic households and were given an eleven week course of stable management, riding and young leadership training. The project worked really well with great engagement from the participants. The project was possible due to some very kind ARC members who signed up as volunteers for Befriend a Child, to provide a lift to and from the yard on a Saturday morning for the young people.

We funded the first project ourselves as we were confident that it would be successful and help local young people and we were unable to get support from the local authority or the charity that delivers sport on the local authority behalf.

Having completed the project and having the data to show what a great success it was, we then decided to take a slightly different route and apply for non-sport related lottery funding as we seem to meet a lot of barriers when we have to go through sports specific funding channels.

We got the great news just before Xmas that we were successful in our application to the National Lottery Awards for All and have been awarded 70% of the cost of running TWO more Project Marios in 2026! This is such brilliant news both for young people in the area, but also for equestrian activity which at grass roots level always seems to be overlooked through sports support and funding. So we will be liaising with Befriend a Child to get some dates in place for another two projects and will put the details in our next newsletter and on social media as we’d really like members to be involved again supporting the project by volunteering with transport – the members who did it for the last project we’re sure would fully recommend it – they really enjoyed their time volunteering as they could watch and get involved with the sessions with the young people too whilst waiting to give them a lift home. So do please keep your eyes peeled for further information around this as it makes such a big difference to some young people’s lives.