Week 8 Blog #3

In the article “Snohomish therapeutic-horseback-riding lessons for children ends,” by Jennifer Sullivan, it is announced that a long time riding center for disabled people has all of a sudden shut down out of the blue. They have been relying on donations from the public because they are a nonprofit organization but this year their key fundraiser had barely anyone sign up for it. This was a huge shocker to the board of the program and in order to cut his losses without going into anymore debt he had to shut EquiFriends (the riding program) down. This was a complete shock to the public and no one, not even the employees saw this coming. They are in the process right now of selling their tack and equipment in order to pay back families that have already paid the program for their kids lessons. EquiFriends had already gone over their $50,000 bank credit and are completely out of money. The economy right now isn’t helping either since everyone has lost so much money in the stocks they don’t have any extra money to donate. The author of this article believes that it was a complete shock that EquiFriends closed down. She believes that this is a huge disaster for the families that sent their children there and it was large downfall for the community. People had specifically moved their children up to the Snohomish area in order to give their kids this unique kind of therapy. Families have also been struggling to pay for it so much since the government won’t cover any of the costs. EquiFriends tried to help these families by only charging them a third of what the price really should have been. I was completely blown away when I heard that this place was shutting down because it had been doing so well for the past ten years. It is a huge loss for the community and is a large example as to how bad our county’s economy has gotten. One question about this topic that I would like to explore is if there is any way of them making a comeback or if it is totally over? If the economy comes back up will they still have the money to restart what they have just shut down?

Article used: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008284301_equifriends19m.html