Acres of Hope, based in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, provides a safe, peaceful place for young people facing life challenges, including trauma, abuse, and mental health struggles.
Emmy and Justin Arana share that horses possess a unique and powerful therapeutic ability to connect with - and help heal - traumatized youth through nonverbal emotional reflection and their calming physical presence.
“Acres of Hope is an organization that really, God gave Emmy this vision for well over 10 years ago now, but just a peaceful place to help youth in our community navigating difficult times in their life, really all aspects of hurt and trauma from maybe losing a loved one to cancer or something along those lines to bullying gender identity to extreme cases of neglect and abuse and kind of everything in between.
We are just a safe space to wrap our arms around these kids and just give them a place that they're excited to come back to each week. And within all of that, God plays a huge role allowing us to do this, allowing us to be here and just giving these kids grace and showing them God's love,” explains Justin Arana.
(Richard) “It's very clear that horses play a very important role in what happens there. What is it about horses? What is so special? What goes on?
Emmy shares, “Sometimes it's hard to articulate, but I'll do my best because there's so much nonverbal with horses. God just designed them so beautifully. And actually one of the things that a lot of people don't realize about horses is they'll reflect our emotions back to us. So, these kids that come in, sometimes it's anger, sometimes it's sadness.
But I had a youth in particular that was struggling with anger and the horse was just extra sassy and reflecting this back. And we talk to the kids about everything, we walk them through anything that's happening with the horses, they learn everything from the ground up. And I got to say to this kid, what do you think is going on with Dali? That was the horse at the time. And she said, it's me. Like she fully could admit and own that it was her own emotions and she was able to just take a deep breath.”
And I said, do you want to try again? And she tried again with the horse. And the horse did a 180 because she did. So, she was aware of her emotions and they're just beautiful teachers. We've had horses take care of kids during panic attacks. Horses have lower heart rates than us, and so they actually will lower our heart rate, and they're actually physically just calming to be around. So, it is pretty cool to watch just God's unique design that he made these horses in and how they interact with the kids. So,there's a lot of God moments in that.”
(Richard) I understand that the sessions are at no cost. How do you do that, Justin?
“We don't. We pray, and God does… since the very beginning, God laid on Emmy's heart here that we wanted to eliminate as many barriers as possible to serve the youth that God really put on Emmy's heart. And one of those was finances. If we were going to step out on a limb and put I guess all of our eggs in one basket and start this non-profit and just rely on God, then we were going to do it fully. And that meant to start this business for completely no cost to the families we serve. And on paper, it really looks like a horrible business plan, but it is working and the community believes in what we're doing and God is providing abundantly. And it is because of him leading the way.
He [God] gave me this dream once He gave me this vision a few months ago of God just sitting on this giant bulldozer in front of us, in front of our whole team. And that's kind of how it's been. He's just plowing away and providing everything that we need, not everything that we want, but everything that we need. And through this journey, we've been navigating what it means to be a nonprofit and what it means to fund raise and really share with the community all that God is doing here on the ranch. And it's been an incredible opportunity to be able to do that.”
The Past Leads to the Future, God Used The Pain
Emmy experienced trauma in her younger years, and you can hear more about that in our podcast interview below. That trauma, and forward guidance from God, set Emmy on a course for a plan God had for her years later.
“So, before this, I was a classroom teacher in a middle school for eight years and I taught a core subject and I just saw the hurting kids in my classroom. And God has always just given me a heart for that. And I saw these hurting kids and just started praying, ‘What can we do to reach them?” Me, in a classroom of 35, I would hang out with some of them at lunch and they'd talk about doing drugs with their friends. And I just started to pray, ‘How can we reach these kids?’” And God started to process my own pain and trauma when I was a teenager and just started to remind me ‘what helped when you went through these hard times.’
And so, he gave me this vision to pair hurting kids and broken kids and kids that are isolated and depressed and sad and don't want anything to do with God, to pair them with horses. And so, admittedly, I'm a recovering perfectionist, and prayed about it for a very long time before actually moving forward with anything. So, like Justin said, it was like 10 plus years ago that God gave me this vision and just following his leading and following him.”
"So, Acres of Hope would not exist without what I went through as a teenager."
Here's our complete, encouraging, podcast interview just below:
More about Acres of Hope in Independence, Oregon
