Colin Emonson wonders if he’d never read a brief passage in a book by Monty Roberts — the man who listens to horses — whether the idea to create Horses for Hope ever would have formed in his mind.
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“I remember the spark,” he says with a glint in his eye, as we chat at the mental health service’s peaceful Mooroopna North property a few months after his July 2024 retirement.
Mr Emonson has worked in youth and family services for 40-odd years, after spending his first 10 years out of school after Year 9 working on the family farm, where he thought he’d work for ever.
Twenty-one years ago, he founded Horses for Hope.
“We never serviced teenagers well and often when services weren’t working for them, they got blamed, so they just fell through the gaps,” Mr Emonson said.
“So much of my career was thinking about and looking for ways to do it better. My interests were always in the area of those ones most at risk.”
American horseman Monty Roberts was doing unique work with horses, listening to them and communicating with them in a way that allowed them to feel safe and adopt people as their leaders.
He would take a horse who feared him to demonstrate to audiences how, with his method, he could transition a horse from fear to trust within 20 minutes.
“I thought maybe there’s something in this struggle that we have to engage, with young people in particular, to be able to get over those barriers and to be able to say, ‘okay, I trust you’, because that’s the basis of all work we do with people in this system,” Mr Emonson recalled.
He’s had horses of his own since his parents relented to his pleas to get him his first at 15.
He said he thought they predicted he’d grow out of it, but he never did and proclaims he is a horseman through and through.
There was a troubled youth in residential care where he worked when the idea started to grow legs, who was smashing walls and disengaged with everyone around him.
Mr Emonson took him to see a horse and by the end of the visit, the boy and counsellor were engaged in conversation.
He tried the method with another he thought might benefit. Then another, and another, experiencing positive outcomes with all of them.
“Uniting Care Cutting Edge Youth Services recognised the potential of the service and Tiffany Peverall and I brought the horsemanship and welfare parts together,” Mr Emonson said.
“It’s been an amazing journey to experiment and find what worked to introduce to the program that is now fine-tuned.
“We’ve ended up with a model of operating now that is really firm, really solid. It’s articulated and is replicable.”
Horses for Hope started servicing youth, but these days, it services anyone who’s affected adversely by mental health issues; people who’ve experienced trauma and people of all ages.
“They say a horse holds a mirror to who you are. If you’re up, the horse is up. If you’re down, the horse is down,” Mr Emonson said.
“We want the reflection to be strong and we also genuinely want them to feel like they’ve made a difference to the horse as well.”
Mr Emonson said equine-assisted therapy “wasn’t a thing” when Horses for Hope was established.
“It was all different to what we do, and we’re still unique in what we do now, most other services use the quiet horse,” he said.
“Some equine-assisted therapies work on the basis of being healed by horses because there’s a healing presence in them.
“But there’s so much more available.”
Horses for Hope works with a combination of give and take, the participants help the horses and the horses help the participants.
While it was a step into the great unknown, Mr Emonson believes convention needs to be challenged, but not without caution.
“Whenever you step outside the square, you’re often challenging those who are within the square,” Mr Emonson said.
“If you do something different and there’s something valuable happening within that, you are in some ways challenging the practices that are otherwise insistent.
“You have to be super cautious about how you promote that ... because you can get yourself offside really easily.
Mr Emonson is firm that having an idea and developing it into the effective model it is today are not the only two ingredients for longevity and success, attributing beliefs, attitudes and role-modelling for playing parts.
“In the lottery of birth, I got pretty lucky,” he said.
“We are born where we’re born. It could be in a Third World country, it could here, it could be here in different ways, on the other side of the tracks.
“I was not born into wealth, but a really solid family. My dad was a Christian guy who lived those values, they guided his life strongly and I don’t mean in the practice of religion, but in the spirit of living your life well for the community and people around you.”
He says his upbringing instilled principles and an inquiring mind about how communities should work.
“We all have a responsibility for everybody else in the community,” Mr Emonson said.
It’s a mighty gesture for someone who wasn’t born into the local community — rather a small Mallee town named Turriff, south of Ouyen, where he went to school.
He came to Shepparton to supervise a couple of family group homes for Melbourne’s Burwood Children’s Homes for work and felt settled after having three kids with his former wife here.
“You just become part of the community,” he said.
“I guess I would have moved on for work if I needed to, but I’m very happy living in this area.”
Mr Emonson worked for FamilyCare for 11 years, in which time he set it up as an organisation.
He also spent time working at Berry Street, Cutting Edge Youth Services and doing consultancy along the way.
Now, he’s 72 and ready to enjoy his retirement on the small acreage “just up the road” from Horses for Hope with his partner, Mary, with whom he shares 18 grandchildren.
After seeing more than 5000 human participants and hundreds of horses through the aptly named service, he’s looking forward to putting all his quality time into his own horses and family.
“Retiring just becomes essential. You cannot keep doing it; physically it’s impossible for that to happen,” he said, after two and a half years of succession planning to ensure the service was left in capable hands.
“I probably did keep going longer than I should have, but I’m content I’ve done the best I can so I can retire.”
When asked what he’d like to see become of his brainchild in the future, he quipped: “Horses for Hope International sounds good.”
“I say it in jest, but my hope is that it continues on the trajectory of learning and improving ... wherever there are people who can benefit from this, it should exist,” Mr Emonson said.
“The opportunity to finish my career doing this is just incredible; I’m just so privileged that the universe and the people and services in this community have enabled me to do this.
“It’s just absolutely incredible.”
Senior journalist