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Riding center in financial crunch

• A Leesburg therapeutic riding center may have to close its door without significant financial help.

Joshua Brown

LEESBURG — Unless it receives some significant funding this year, the Southwest Georgia Therapeutic Riding Center will be closing its stables by December, its director said Wednesday.

The center, located on Philema Road, has been operating on a bare-bones budget since its start up 10 years ago, Director Tara Okon said. Okon opened the center and has run it as a volunteer because funding was so scarce, she said.

“We need somebody that will give us some kind of huge donation so we can survive off the interest,” she said. “I just can’t keep doing this and not have the funding.”

The center has survived for as long as it has because it would occasionally get horses it could sell for a moderate profit, though no such horses have been given to the center recently, Okon said.

Okon said one problem she faces is preparing to send her 12-year-old autistic son to college in the near future, which would cost $50,000 a year more than the average student because Okon would have to hire a paraprofessional.

Another factor compounding the problem is that the center isn’t in a particularly wealthy region like similar centers located in New York City or Atlanta and cannot attract a wealthy donor, she said.

“We just don’t have the outstanding wealth there is in New York City and in Connecticut and in Nashville, (Tenn.), where there is so much funding,” she said.

Okon hopes to have enough funds to last until Dec. 15 so the center can take its children to the Special Olympics one final time. She said she also hoped that a grant writer and an accountant would donate their services to the center, which she said would be “a wonderful asset.”

The center operates with a mostly volunteer staff — it only has one paid employee — and runs on a budget of about $85,000 a year, Okon said, though an annual budget of about $150,000 would allow it to operate comfortably.

Several comparably sized centers, she said, operate on at least $650,000 annual budgets.

The riding center helps those with disabilities learn balance and coordination through horseback riding and has served more than 850 patients from 12 Georgia counties in its 10 years, according to a news release from the center.

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