Harvest for Heroes raises money for One Step Closer

Published in the August 24 – September 6, 2016 issue of Gilroy Life

By Marty Cheek

Photo courtesy One Step Closer Children learn basic riding skills from volunteers at One Step Closer in Morgan Hill.

Photo courtesy One Step Closer
Children learn basic riding skills from volunteers at One Step Closer in Morgan Hill.

When Landa Keirstead was a young girl, her father in the U.S. Air Force was stationed overseas during the Vietnam War. The 10-year-old child found solace in neighbors’ horses. She knew then that these animals would be an important part of her life.

As an adult with teen children of her own, Keirstead began her horsemanship journey that led to the creation of the South Valley nonprofit One Step Closer. The award-winning equestrian organization uses the human-horse relationship to help children and veterans achieve their full potential — physically, emotionally and spiritually.

“One Step Closer Therapeutic Riding is a premier accredited equestrian organization helping children and adults with special needs and U.S. military veterans improve physically, emotionally, cognitively, and socially,” Keirstead said. “The goal is to help our participants be productive and independent in their lives outside the arena, by using safe equine facilitated therapies.”

The idea for OSC came to Landa in 2005 after she learned about therapeutic riding centers such as the National Center For Equine Facilitated Therapy in Woodside. By December of that year, she had decided to leave her career in the dental field to become a certified therapeutic riding instructor and start her own center on Foothill Avenue southeast of Morgan Hill. The center has grown a reputation in the Bay Area for its effectiveness in helping its clients through the two main programs it offers.

The Adaptive Riding Program is designed to serve children and adults with special needs. There are typically 25 students a week who are helped. These include young people with challenges such as autism, developmental delays, speech delays, cerebral palsy, Down Syndrome, ADD/ADHD, traumatic brain injury and brain tumor among other conditions.

OSC’s U.S. Military Program was established in 2013 with a formal partnership between the center and the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System. Most of the veterans enrolled are men and women who suffer from post-traumatic stress. Some are veterans of recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, others from Desert Storm, and others from Vietnam and other conflicts.

“As a result of the PTS, some veterans struggle with sobriety, employment, relationships, and homelessness. Some are estranged from their families,” she said. “Equine assisted therapy helps veterans with issues of trust, communication skills, understanding boundaries and appropriate conflict management, and has serves more than 400 veterans a year…. Having grown up in military families, we included in our program a plan to provide equine-assisted-therapy to veterans.”

One of the veterans who was helped shared his experience at OSC anonymously because of privacy. He participated in the veterans’ program through its partnership with the VA Palo Alto Health Care System as a VA inpatient and as a volunteer for OSC’s support of the VA inpatient programs.

“As an inpatient, One Step Closer’s program provides veterans who are participating in rigorous treatment programs the ability to learn and apply skills outside the clinical environment in a safe, accepting, and rewarding environment,” he said.

“As a former inpatient, I cannot overemphasize the value of this experience. Those brief few hours of normalcy, where we were given the opportunity to reconnect with ourselves and with another living creature, were invaluable. The ability to practice the skills of trust, communication, leadership, and acceptance in an environment with absolutely no judgment was truly a liberating experience for myself and a huge part of my recovery from my illness.”

Where other therapies failed him he found “a pathway to sanity,” the veteran said.

“This program has truly helped me put my life back together and I have seen it do the same for others.”

To help pay for the therapy, which is provided at no charge to veterans, OSC is holding a Harvest for Heroes Benefit on Saturday, Sept. 17 at the historic Villa Mira Monte center in Morgan Hill. The event features live country-western music and dancing to the Country Cougars. Guests will enjoy an elegant dinner catered by Renee Carrillo of GVA Café, as well as award-winning local wines, a silent auction, and a special message about Veterans delivered by former Secretary of the Army Frank Harvey.

The operating costs of the OSC program are covered solely by grants and donations from the community, said Mark Keirstead. With Thrivent Community, an investment firm in Silicon Valley, offsetting the Harvest for Heroes fundraiser expenses, all of the event proceeds will go to the veterans served at One Step Closer.

“As the program has grown to serving about 200 veterans per year, so has our operating cost,” he said. “Currently, grants cover 50 percent of the operating cost. Harvest for Heroes was created as a fundraiser to specifically target the veterans program.”

And for the Keirsteads, the best thing about working on One Step Closer is the satisfaction of bringing benefits to the lives of hundreds of children and veterans each year.

“It’s the horse-human relationship, and seeing these horses helping so many different people in so many ways,” Mark said.

HOW TO HELP

Visit: www.osctr.org /donors/

Marty Cheek