There’s a fitness club in Maryland that stands apart from your usual corner gym. At SPIRIT Club, individuals with physical and developmental disabilities are lifting weights, doing aerobics, and working with personal trainers in an environment that prizes diversity, respect and inclusion. SPIRIT (Social-Physical-Interactive-Respectful-Integrated-Teamwork) Club Founder Jared Ciner talks about how his work as a fitness instructor and with individuals with special needs coalesced into SPIRIT Club and the ancillary SPIRIT Club Foundation – a Good People Fund grantee – to ensure that physical health and socialization be accessible to all.

An unexpected moment of sadness and isolation visited Dr. Anita Shkedi as thoughts of her son Jonathan – an Israel Defense Forces soldier who lost his life in conflict – overwhelmed her.

At the time, she was at an equine center she had founded on the Israeli coast to advance the practice of therapeutic horseback riding. A Pinto horse named Starlight sensed her distress and came close.

“I may have started to cry, as feelings were coming up in me,” she remembered. “She put her head up against me. She pushed into me and we were bonded. As I let my feelings out, she was telling me she was there for me.”

There on the cover of Dr. Shkedi’s just-published book, Horses Heal PTSD – Walking New Paths, is a picture of that very moment. A documentary filmmaker, who happened to be on the property that day, captured it.

Considering that Dr. Shkedi is an established authority on the relational history between humans and horses – and the immense mental and physical healing benefits that can flow from it – the fact that she herself was the recipient at a time of raw vulnerability is remarkable, and makes the book itself even more passionately grounded.

“I will never forget it,” she said. “It was one of the most emotional and genuine moments I’ve had with a horse. It was like together we were not in this universe.”

It is of this relationship that she writes over 238 pages of contextual histories and case studies of how PTSD – afflicting all manner of people from children who have been sexually abused, and soldiers who saw and endured the horrors of conflict, to women who have been raped, and youth living with domestic violence – can be mitigated through purposefully designed interaction with horses, including caring for and riding them, and creating bonds.

The research and practice is colloquially known as therapeutic horseback riding, and more formally as Equine Assisted Activities and/or Therapy (EAA/T). Dr. Shkedi – a pioneer in the discipline – adds to the growing literature on the subject with the new book.

“It is heavy stuff,” she said. “But I hope to the lay reader, this will be almost a self-help book. People have multiple traumas and they spend a lot of time trying to shut them out and avoid the monsters coming to the surface. We need to deal with them and instill hope.

“You can’t quick fix PTSD. You have to work it through a process until you can manage it so it doesn’t take over every part of your brain. That is my aim, by using our relationship with horses and the non-verbal communication that occurs to restore trust and build healing.”

The book is Dr. Shkedi’s second. In 2012, she authored Traumatic Brain Injury and Therapeutic Riding, a more clinical examination of how horse-based therapies can be used to help people suffering severe head injuries.

In 2003, Dr. Shkedi and her husband, Giora, founded the Israel National Therapeutic Riding Association (INTRA) – a veteran and longtime grantee organization of The Good People Fund – as a national center for EAA/T in Israel.

It serves a full spectrum of children, youth and adults with significant life challenges to improve their long-term physical, social, and emotional well being, and is particular known for its work with IDF soldiers with PTSD.

Of the book’s reception so far, Dr. Shkedi said she is already in contact with people seeking help. One woman in Texas, for example, reached out because her 10-year-old son is experiencing PTSD due to multiple physical and psychological traumas.

“If through this book I can give hope to those who are suffering, then it’s done its job.”

Dr. Shkedi will read from her new book and answer questions on a live Zoom event at 1 pm Eastern on Wednesday, May 5.  To register, visit www.anitashkedi.com.

By H. Glenn Rosenkrantz

The Good People Fund in partnership with its grantees, helps to improve the lives and trajectories of Aspiring Americans – refugees, victims of human trafficking, and others – seeking safety, community, and opportunity despite enormous challenges. In this episode, Good People Fund Executive Director Naomi Eisenberger speaks with four change makers in this realm, who describe their unique experiences, observations, and approaches to uplifting newcomers seeking better lives for themselves and their families.  Our guests: Kristen Bloom, Founder and Executive Director of Refugee Assistance Alliance in Coral Gables, FL; Sloane Davidson, Founder and CEO of Hello Neighbor in Pittsburgh, PA; Kari Miller, Founder and Executive Director of International Neighbors in Charlottesville, VA; and Dr. Eva Moya, Associate Professor, Dept. of Social Work, The University of Texas at El Paso.

The Good People Fund visits with three of our change makers in Detroit. Each draws on intense personal journeys as they work to uplift and give hope to youth at risk – in a city once written off, but now benefiting from the creative visions of social entrepreneurs. Join Good People Fund Executive Director Naomi Eisenberger as she speaks with Sherelle Hogan, Founder of Pure Heart Foundation, David Silver, Founder of Detroit Horse Power, and Courtney Smith, Founder of Detroit Phoenix Center.

Walk through the inner city and other challenged areas and you’ll see a different food landscape than across town: fewer grocery stores, more fast-food places, and unhealthy choices. FEAST (Food – Education – Access – Support – Together), an LA-based organization supported by The Good People Fund, is changing that reality. FEAST Executive Director Dana Rizer describes how.

Courtney Smith was out of college and living with housemates in Detroit when the doorbell rang. Her brother, six years younger, was homeless and without resources and needed help.

She took him in, at least for the interim. But soon, a handful of his friends from the street – all in similar circumstances – were camped out on air mattresses strewn throughout the basement.

The situation was all too disturbingly and shockingly familiar. Courtney herself had grown up in the foster care system, and was adopted into a family, but left at age 15 due to family conflict and ended up couch surfing, doubling up, and living in shelters. And even in college, she faced housing insecurity.

“Homelessness is very personal to me,” she said. “It can be a cyclical issue that goes on for generations if we don’t do something about it.”

And so she set out to do so, starting on a determined path that led to the founding in 2016 of Detroit Phoenix Center (DPC), the city’s first-ever drop-in center for street-connected youth. DPC is a new grantee organization of The Good People Fund.

The organization offers various low-barrier portals into a safe space for teens and young adults who are at risk of or experiencing homelessness. There, they can access basics that can mean survival – from showers, meals, laundry services, lockers, day beds, and other needs, to career and life skills workshops, computer labs, housing crisis support … and a community of care and concern.

Pre-pandemic, DPC reached and engaged about 150 teens and young adults each year. But for the very fact that there is simply no other such place in Detroit – one designed with a holistic approach to help them with immediate and daily needs, and also to disrupt predictable and unwelcome trajectories – many may have disappeared into the environment with no trace or hope.

As COVID-19 has resulted in increasingly restricted access to DPC, and quite literally exposed a severely vulnerable population to illness and death, the organization has taken to the streets. It is finding street-connected youth where they congregate and live to bring them mobile- and virtual-supported help, assistance and counsel – ranging from basics like face masks and hand sanitizer, to healthy food and housing vouchers.

“Many don’t have anywhere to go to shelter in place,” Courtney said. “Many don’t have access to running water and soap to wash their hands for 20 seconds. Many are living in abandoned buildings in groups of ten or more, and transmission is an issue.

“We’ve had to change our whole service provision during this time and be innovative. They are very high risk and vulnerable during a pandemic. We have to be out there.”

At the heart of DPC is Courtney’s recognition that it would be nothing if not informed by the youth that it attracts and serves. In fact, she labels herself a “servant leader.”

“The work we do is truly driven by heart and humility and selflessness,” she said. “There is no ego here. The youth are the ones who have to be centered and elevated. Their lived experiences form the fabric of DPC, and intentionality in putting their voices first is key to allowing them to be served effectively.”

In fact, DPC has a “Youth Action Board” that provides leadership and personal development for members who have direct experience with homelessness and other adverse societal conditions as they give input into DPC programming, services and reach, and advocate for positive systemic change.

Ask Courtney what’s at the heart of her passion and commitment to uplift and help vulnerable youth in Detroit, and she speaks about that “lived experience.” It’s a term that comes up frequently in conversation with her, framing as it does a worldview of not only challenges, but also solutions.

It took on even deeper significance and meaning when her brother, Blair – who knocked on her door at a moment of need just a few short years earlier – died by suicide at the age of 19. It was on the eve of the opening of DPC, which he’d helped to envision and design, and where he was voted by peers as first president of the Youth Action Board.

“There is a pain point for me in this work,” Courtney said. “Those can either cripple us or force us to show up in the world as the best versions of ourselves. I chose the latter.”

By H. Glenn Rosenkrantz, for The Good People Fund