Corporate team building experience
Want to experience a challenging new team building approach while also helping reach over 300 vulnerable young Londoners?
Bring your corporate teams and help to support young people with significant needs who are at risk of mental health crises, gang involvement and are at risk of being excluded from education.
Combining the unique qualities of horses with the knowledge and experience of clinical psychologists, we bring out the best in your employees by helping you to create a happy harmonious and hardworking team.
Leadership and team building days designed to challenge and engage your team while helping vulnerable young people across London. The horse trainers & psychologists help the team to make reflections on how the team is functioning and identify relevant lessons to take back to the office.
We work with horses to reflect on team dynamics and the individual role in that team, involving team building tasks which require the team to collectively influence the behaviour of horses in order to complete a series of teamwork tasks. ‘Crystal Maze’ but with horses!
Horses rely on their ability to forge relationships with each other for survival. Horses pick up on the energy and emotions of teams and reflect this in their behaviour giving immediate experiential feedback on the functioning of the team.
Prices start from £350 per person, contact us through our referrals form and your event manager will tailor your bespoke programme.
All activities are on the ground and non-ridden, no prior experience is required
Your corporate team day will:
Boost confidence
Improve body language
Heighten empathy
Draw out leadership qualities
Improve colleague respect and team values
Enable engagement and reconnecting with each other
Your corporate team day involves:
Consultant session to understand key challenges and team objectives
Bespoke team building sessions combining a mixture of horse training and loosely structured teamwork tasks. Work together as a team with a herd of horses to influence the horse’s behaviour using the team’s energy and problem solving abilities to successfully complete tasks
Post workshop session exploring roles and team dynamics during the tasks and relating this to what happens in the work environment
Our Work
We are a charity partnership run by senior Clinical Psychologists and Nationally Respected Horse Trainers. We work with London’s most vulnerable young people who are excluded from education or at risk of exclusion. Typical young people we work have multiple mental health diagnoses and have experienced childhood abuse and / or neglect. Many have a learning difficulty diagnosis and over 30% have been diagnosed with autism.
The young people we work with have lost all trust in humans and are typically living very isolated lives. Our horses break down the barriers that young people put up because they react honestly to the emotions and behaviours that young people show. As prey animals 99% of a horse’s communications is via body language. This means they pick up on human emotions and mirror them in their own behaviour. A horse will run away from an angry young person, ignore an unsure young person, relax around a calm young person etc. Through working with these natural reactions the young people learn to identify and manage their emotions in order to build relationships with our horses.
As young people learn to trust the horses they begin to rebuild trust in humans, starting with our staff and extending to the other education and mental health support professionals in other support organisations. This newfound trust along with the confidence and interpersonal skills developed with us enables young people to turn their lives around and re engage with education and society more generally.
CSR & Social Impact
Each session directly funds eight of London’s most disadvantaged young people to access our life changing service for 4-12 weeks. When the young people finish their programme of therapy or education you’ll be sent a report outlining the impact of the programme of the service on their lives, including personal quotes, testimonials and thanks.
You will be offered the opportunity to engage with further mentoring with the students that you have helped through the team building day.
M&G Investments - Case study
In November 2017 we welcomed 30 staff members from M&G Investments for a day of team building with our horses, with the goal of improving communication within the team. The group spent half of the day in smaller teams, getting to know the horses, learning horse-training techniques designed to develop observation skills and self-awareness. After a hearty lunch the group had great fun with activities that required working together with the horses in a larger team. This forced them outside of their comfort zone; enabling them to build trust in one another and explore new ways to engage with and relate to their colleagues.
The overwhelmingly positive feedback at the end of the day highlighted the value and benefits that working with horses in this unique way can bring to any team, and as no horse-riding is involved, no prior experience of horses is needed to get a lot from the day!
“I felt more confident and this has made me rethink and focus on how aware I am of my own energy levels and others”
“It was good fun all round and well organised”
“I gained a new respect for our different personalities and anxieties”
“I got to see another side of people I thought I knew quite well”
“Today helped me develop better empathy and ways of supporting others and my teamwork generally”
“I got a thrill from doing something new and worthwhile!”
What did the funding do?
The M&G team building day directly funded:
8 young people who were permanently excluded from education to attend a 12 week Employability & Horsemanship Skills Education programme. This equipped them with the confidence, skills and an accredited qualification in order to re-engage with education or employment.
6 young people from an adolescent mental health inpatient unit struggling with extreme mental health challenges to attend a 10 week programme of equine assisted therapy. This enabled the young people to reflect on their emotions and personal challenges through thinking about the horses’ behaviour and feelings and supported them in making the transition from the inpatient unit back to living with their families.
Our Young People said:
“Thanks to M&G I got to attend a 12 week education programme at SLTH. On the course I learnt lots of things about horses but also about myself. I now know ways that I react to people. I can see now that sometimes I find it hard to say ‘no to people’. The course has taught me to be assertive with horses and I am starting to be in my life too. This is the first time I have done anything with my life and I’m so grateful. I know now that I will be ok with a job. I can find the motivation to keep going even when the thing we are doing is disgusting like mucking out the stable or hard and the horse is taking ages for it to learn to do something. I just don't give up now.”
“Thanks to M&G I got to attend therapy sessions at SLTH. It’s changed my life completely for the better. I learnt that I can be strong, even if I feel small. I now know how to be calm and patient with the horses which taught me sometimes I should be calm and patient with myself.”