“Healing Hooves: Inside The Fidelis Foundation”
For two hours on Sundays, magic happens at Jennifer LeFever’s JL Equine Center at Double C Ranch in Myrtle Beach.
But you won’t find magicians or illusionists here – no levitation, no sleight-of-hand – no deception of any sort.
What you will find are horses, children, volunteers and a group of remarkable women.
The Fidelis Foundation of Myrtle Beach [www.fidelisfoundationsc.com] is a program that provides Equine Assisted Learning for at-risk youth – kids in crisis who have experienced loss or trauma in their lives. A passage on the organization’s Web site elegantly lays out its raison d'être:
“Our mission is to facilitate permanent, emotional healing for children in crisis due to trauma, neglect or abuse, through creative assisted learning. We mentor both equine and personal skills, helping the youth to develop the ability to make and set goals and to assist them make life-long positive changes.”
Fidelis, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, recently celebrated five years in operation in Myrtle Beach with the support of sponsors and donations from groups and individuals. It works with several agencies on the Grand Strand, including Lighthouse Care Center of Conway, CASA, Celebrate Kids, Seacoast Youth Academy and Heartland Hospice.
The program was founded in South Florida in 2007 by a woman named Stacy Gormley, a former foster parent and professional horse trainer. Her nonprofit is no longer active.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch –
Jennifer LeFever says that horses have always been in her life.
“I told my mom that she was jinxed,” she said. “Before I was born, my great-grandfather told my mother that if she had a girl, she had to name her Nancy Jane because he had a plow horse named Nancy Jane, and it was the best horse he ever owned.”
Her mother refused to name her daughter after a horse.
“I came out walking and talking horses, and at age three I started taking lessons,” she said.
LeFever, originally from Roanoke, VA, enjoyed a 13-year career as a trick rider for Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede in Pigeon Forge, TN, Branson, MO, and Myrtle Beach.
She started the JL Equine Center after leaving Dixie Stampede, ostensibly because she wanted to spend more time with her son Nicholas, now 15. She also has a five-year-old son, Matthew.
“We teach both English and western [riding] lessons,” she said. “Kids come daily to take lessons and there are a couple of different instructors there – then on Sundays we run the Fidelis program out of it.”
LeFever owns 12 horses, but said there are close to 30 at the barn.
“We do Equine Assisted Learning to help with kids,” she said. “Sometimes the kids are so shut down and they don’t necessarily communicate or talk too much to people, but when you bring the horses into the equation they feel like they have a little bond with them.”
And then the trust factor comes into play – and it’s a two-way street between the horse and the child.
LeFever said it is amazing to watch the process, starting when the child comes in, often with no expression and not wanting to look at anybody – and not sure if they want to ride or even get in the saddle.
“They start to brush the horse – and then we get the saddles on. And then, ‘well maybe I will get on, but let’s not move’ – and by the end they are able to trot around with the volunteers going with them. They are not on the horses by themselves.”
And then there are the ones that have been coming to the program for a while.
“They are able to walk and trot by themselves – and some of them are even able to canter,” she said, adding that many request the same horse each time.
“I think sometimes we get as much out of it as the kids do because we enjoy interacting with them.”
But she said she can’t imagine the weight on their shoulders.
“It’s just terrible,” she said. “These are kids you might pass in the hall at school and think nothing about it. And you don’t know they have so much stuff that they are trying to deal with in their life. We had one where the grandfather died and then the grandmother wound up with cancer – and they were the ones who were raising them. I can’t imagine if you are ten and trying to go through these things.”
She became involved with Fidelis when the founders in Florida decided that they wanted to branch out. Greg Anderson, who was pastor at Myrtle Beach Community Church [now Beach Church] before he moved to Calvary Chapel in Fort Lauderdale, FL, was by this time on the board of the Fidelis program in Florida.
“[Anderson] said there was nothing like this in Myrtle Beach, so they came up here on faith – trying to figure where to go and what to do.”
In what LeFever says was a roundabout way, they found out about JL Equine Center.
“They asked me if I would be interested and I was like, ‘Sure. I’ve got the horses – I’ve got the tack – how hard can it be,” she said. “I didn’t think about all of the paperwork with trying to get the 501 and get all of that into place – but it worked out fine.”
Do horses have a sort of empathy for these kids? Is there any way to know this?
“I think that the horses tend to know what you are capable of – not necessarily what you are going through. And they know know if you are advanced versus if you are a beginner.”
She told us the story of Maya, a strong-willed mare.
“She is actually on stage at Carolina Opry at Christmas and she pulls the sleigh,” she said. “She is a tester – and it works for us because we get to show the kids a little bit about how they also test their boundaries.
Maya is like– ‘If you can’t make me and you are not stronger than I am, maybe I’d just like to stand here and not necessarily listen to you.”
The kids, obviously, get this because some of them can relate.
And everyone is welcome to ride if they want to. “You might get one that doesn’t want to get on – and we have some that just want to help and be part of it,” she said.
Fidelis Foundation Outreach coordinator Sybil Lee comes from a prevention background, and said she sees her role as reaching out to at-risk youth to give them hope and a sense of direction so that they can become productive citizens.
“The youth that we reach are probably as young as four years old to 17 or 18, and these are our riders,” she said. “We have volunteers from 13 years old and up – and I have found that some of our volunteers are just as much at-risk than the ones we are reaching out to,” she said. “But they have a heart for giving, and so they are receiving.”
Lee said that the at-risk youth that come into the program – some from group homes – may have been abused by a parent, or have a parents with addictions, or might have suffered the loss of a loved one – perhaps a parent, grandparent, aunt or uncle or a sibling. “These are traumatic events in their lives,” she said. “Sometimes you don’t see the needs of the ones we are reaching out to. It’s like their hearts are broken.”
A good deal of her time is spent on motivating and educating her volunteers – to keep the program staffed and running smoothly. “I also make sure those that are coming are coming,” she said.
And it is important to keep the participating organizations on rotation.
“Since we only operate on Sunday for two hours, we have broken it down into five different organizations – and they overlap too in certain situations. I call to make sure they are coming and how many can make it.”
She cites the help of what she calls sharp interns over the past couple of years for shouldering much of this administrative load.
“Even with communications on Facebook and emails and texting – just to make sure that my volunteers can make it out is an awesome responsibility,” she said.
Lee is one of the original members of the Fidelis board here.
Lee took 18 months off from her duties to go to Swaziland with the Peace Corps in 2013. “They believe in sustainability,” she said. “You are not just doing something to make somebody happy for the meantime, and that’s exactly what I believe – and I was leaning more about permaculture gardening, which is one of my loves.”
When she returned stateside, Lee was pleased to see that Fidelis was operating smoothly.
She has no equestrian background.
“I barely knew the front end of a horse from the back end,” she said. “But I knew kids – and I knew that by being with them and just showing them the love of God and that someone in the community cares for them with unconditional love would change their disposition. That’s my end of it. That’s what I do.”
Fidelis board member and Coastal Carolina University Adjunct Professor Nicole Pioli Smith said that she became involved with the program five years ago when she was working at a group home.
She said she was excited when Fidelis opened.
“I rode as a kid and know the benefits of riding,” she said. “I knew that it teaches kids responsibility and communication and building those relationships. For about 2 years, I was responsible for bringing kids out to Fidelis.”
Smith now teaches personal and community health at CCU. When she completed grad school, she was asked to become part of the Fidelis family.
“Right now, I would say that we work with children with disruptive behavior disorders,” she said, adding that these are children who have been in circumstances that have been oppressive or traumatic – children who have been in homes with domestic violence or substance abuse – in foster care or who have lost a family member and have been involved in hospice.
“These are kids who need some kind of healing experience or for their faith in humanity to be restored,” she said.
She is pleased that students from CCU are coming out to volunteer each week, including STAR (Students Taking Active Responsibility) Club members and Gamma Phi Beta sorority members.
Smith is currently secretary for the Fidelis board. “My major role is spreading the word of Fidelis to the community and to people who might be interested in learning more about us – either bringing new children out to our program or creating community awareness for sponsorships so we can grow.”
As far as the organization staying afloat, Smith credits LeFever first.
“Jennifer would be my number one answer to that,” she says. “She has been beyond generous – and when she got involved, she didn’t know what maybe she was getting herself into – that it was going to become such a big program. But she has been selfless in donating her time, her space – her tack, and her horses.”
Donations from individuals, groups and community sponsors are essential to the survival and growth of Fidelis.
“We have had horse shows every year for the last four years at Hardee Lane Farms in Conway, and Prestwick Country Club has held a tennis tournament in our honor for the past two years,” she said. “Those are two businesses we can really thank for believing in our little program.”
Mary Ann Beshears of Celebrate Kids said she hand-picks children for the Fidelis program who have a recovering addict or alcoholic in their families.
“One of the reasons why I target that population is because people in recovery need a lot of support for their children,” she said. “They benefit and really seem to thrive because of the interaction between the parent and the child – doing something positive together in a healthy environment.”
Somebody must accompany the child to the ranch, and often it is the parent in recovery.
“The child learns and improves on life skills that maybe they didn’t get, and the parent is also learning and improving the relationship with their child.”
She credits Fidelis for real changes in self-esteem for many of these children – also an increase in physical fitness from being involved at the ranch. “Some of them have gotten the skills to become helpers now – so they have gone from riders to helpers, from people that are being served to being people that are able to serve others.”
Beshears says she has even seen speech problems improve. “It’s kind of amazing, and I saw better interaction – not just with the animals but with the people around them,” she said.”
Kirby Winstead, grief and bereavement counselor at heartland Hospice in Myrtle Beach, says that he knows what it is like to experience the loss of a parent. His father died when he was very small and his mother passed away when he was in grad school.
Helping children who have suffered the passing of a close immediate family member is no easy task.
“This is a tough job – but we work with the guidance counselors here in the schools and folks that refer to us from churches and other organizations. These are kids that need special attention and some special help.”
Some of this help can be found at JL Equine Center on Sundays.
“Fidelis Foundation helps these children feel special and feel loved,” he said. “It gives them an avenue to get away from the intense emotions that surround their lives – and when you do that, sometimes a child will open up and talk to people they don’t know better than with the people that they do know.”
This bond could begin with a conversation about a particular horse and then develop from there, with the possibility of a child seeing that another person is able to relate to them. “That really pulls down the barriers and allows them to feel like they are in a safe environment in which they can talk about whatever is on their mind,” he said.
CCU sociology major Patrick Clarke got involved with Fidelis when his best friend brought him in last semester. “I don’t get college credit for it, but I pretty much do administrative work and volunteer for their Sunday meetings,” he said. He said he volunteers roughly ten hours per week.
In addition to keeping track of of other volunteers and riders, he also helps guide interns who are getting college credit. But on Sundays, Clarke rolls up his sleeves.
“I will do whichever task they need me to do – whether it will be helping the kids out in the ring with the horses or helping out with an activity – or bouncing back and forth wherever they might be shorthanded.”
Clarke had noticed the profound effect the program has on some children.
“That experience is awesome,” he said. “A lot of the time you will go on a Sunday and you will have kids who don’t have a support system or any real foundation in their lives. Just getting them on a horse and seeing that they can trust in the horse and the horse can trust in them helps them build confidence and trust. And seeing the smiles on their faces once they leave – it’s like that whole process of change within a two hour span. That is just incredible.”
CCU’s Smith said that the Fidelis Foundation and the connection to the amazing women behind it has been a blessing in her life. “There is no such thing as giving without getting something back – and we’ve got a lot going on in that little barn on Sundays.”
This story was originally published December 21, 2015 at 4:51 PM with the headline "“Healing Hooves: Inside The Fidelis Foundation”."