State Employees Credit Union manager Braston Tyndall runs with a log during on of the staff development exercises the SECU team underwent during a visit to Janice Faye’s Ranch.
State Employees Credit Union awards $40K grant to JFR
Members of the SECU group pose for a photo with equine partner Shadow.
Members of the State Employees Credit Union present a $40,000 check to Joy Cannady, founder of Janice Faye’s Ranch. Pictured, from left, are: Parker Patterson,Kelli Adams, Cannady, Braston Tyndall, Stephanie Pierso and Jazmine Stevenson.
Janice Faye Ranch Founder Joy Cannady, right, and team member Kelli Adams.
State Employees Credit Union staff members Parker Patterson, Kelli Adams, Braston Tyndall, Stephanie Pierson and Jazmine Stevens do the Macarena as part of an exercise during their visit to Janice Faye’s Ranch last week.
Last week, the State Employees Credit Union Foundation gifted a $40,000 grant to Janice Faye’s Ranch (JFR), money to assist the local non-profit, which serves children in crisis and their families.
“We are so appreciative of the State Employees Credit Union Foundation and the grant they provided us,” noted JFR founder Joy Cannady, a Sampson native who returned to open the ranch, a calling, she said, from God.
The ranch formed in 2018 and started seeing its first clients in 2020. Since that time, its founder said, the ranch and its mission have been moving forward.
JFR is a dream come true for Cannady who named the ranch in honor of her late mother, Janice Parker.
“God led me to open up this ranch from personal experiences I had in my life. I wanted to be able to help others, and God allowed me to use my love of horses to help children; I’m just using what God gifted me,” asserted Cannady.
Cannady, alongside her volunteers and equine partners, have assisted over 200 people of all ages and backgrounds since opening their doors.
One of her volunteers, Kelli Adams, has been helping with the rescue since 2020, assisting ranch attendees through the use of an eight-to-12-week program to work through issues based on the individual needs of the person or persons involved. “We work with everyone from kids who have been abused to adults trying to face past trauma, helping them to heal,” Adams explained. “There are also occasional group therapy session,too. I just find that the horses help to break down most people’s barriers and, ironically, when most people are allowed to pick an animal to work with here, they often choose one with a similar past which I think shows the connections that people can have with animals.”
To demonstrate how the therapy groups can help, members of the State Employees Credit Union staff were invited to participate in a demonstration of one of the exercises offered at the ranch. The exercise used was called the water brigade, a”fun” exercise with the end goal of getting a horse to simply walk over a log on the ground.
The rules of the game were that out of the group of four, three people had to hold hands in line, with the first and last person in the line holding a bucket of water. Adams would tell them to periodically switch positions. They couldn’t, Adams stressed, bribe the horse.
“Many of the people that we help are used to being bribed into coercion and we are trying to break that cycle of bribery and lying” explained Adam about the key to the actual exercise.
The group was also asked to choose a consequence for breaking the rules, with the agreed upon consequence being the group having to do the Macarena when a rule was broken.
With SECU employee Jazmine Stevenson starting as the group leader, they tried to negotiate how to get their equine partner, Shadow,to cross over the log. It was easier said than done, as the group soon found out. Shadow, it seemed, was more interested in his hay than he was the group of people standing around waiting for him to make his way to the other side of the paddock the group was using for the exercise.
The group changed leaders, with each coming up with a new idea to get the reluctant horse to cross the log.
“This is challenging,” Stevenson noted.
SECU branch manager Braston Tyndall took another approach, bringing the log to Shadow in hopes that shortening the horse’s journey would appease him — it didn’t work.
The exercise was so entertaining that one member of the SECU group spoke, causing the entire group to have to pause the activity and break into the Macarana dance.
The group eventually ran out of time, leading Adams to explain how the exercise can be translated into everyday life. “One thing I never told you all was that you could not empty your buckets. That reflects how many go through life carrying around things when we could empty them and ease our burdens” stressed Adams.
The SECU foundation employees said they were educated and entertained while at the ranch, learning a great deal about the experiences offered to others. And they were just as thrilled to be able to see how the grant would be able to help JFR impact more lives in the community.
The $40,000 in funding comes through SECU’s Mission Development arm which serves the purpose of helping small, non-profits increase and expand throughout all of North Carolina. A total of 10 grants are given each year. This is the first year a grant has been awarded in Sampson County, making the grant both impactful as well as historic, Cannady said.