Do you enjoy helping people, making new friends and learning about and working with horses? Giant Steps has an opportunity for you! Located near Hwy 37 south of Petaluma, Giant Steps needs volunteers to assist with adaptive horseback riding.
A typical volunteer shift starts with coming into the barn a half hour before the lesson time to check the roster for your assignment. It will be either side walker or horse leader. You then assist with getting the horses ready and take them out to the arena. Each lesson is 45 minutes long. After the lesson, the volunteers put the horses away and get the horses ready for the next lesson. The minimum volunteering time is 1 lesson or 1.5 hours, but you can volunteer for multiple lessons.
The first step towards volunteering is filling out our volunteer application here: https://www.giantstepsriding.org/volunteer-application.
Once I receive the completed application, I will send details on how to sign up for an orientation. Orientation is 2.5 hours at our property and is a mixture of learning policies and procedures, and hands on learning working with horses. We also require a background check for each volunteer. The background check is completed for us by Bchex and the information is submitted online. The cost is $19.
After orientation you can sign up to volunteer in lessons. Currently our lessons are held 10am-5pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:30am-5pm on Wednesdays and Fridays, and 10am-4pm on Saturdays. We do not have programming that needs volunteers on Sundays or Mondays right now. Our term are either 12 weeks or 6 weeks long. We strongly prefer that you sign-up for the entire term on the same day and time. For example, the 10am lesson on Tuesday for 12 weeks. If that is not possible, we can always use substitutes!
