Our Vision Our vision is planting seeds, growing skills, and cultivating lives. Planting seeds of knowledge Growing skills by learning and working with animals and agriculture Cultivating participants by helping them attain their goals to guide them towards a successful future
Learning skills by working with animals and agriculture
The area which will eventually become Cultivating Hope Farms consists of an arena and small temporary barn, with a large trench stretching across the property for a water line. But the Perkins hope, with the community's help, a new barn will be constructed soon and the farm will continue to grow beyond even that.
Kids will interact with and take care of goats, horses, pigs and chickens on the farm. They will also have opportunities to learn ranch riding. The farm is partnering with Shiloh Western Training to create a unique Cultivating Hope Farms program.
The Perkins hope to offer various amenities for the ranch program as it grows, including an outdoor arena with warm-up area for ranch horse shows and other events, future covered outdoor horse pens, riding trails, western ranch horse lessons and more.
There will be programming suitable for everyone, Gina Perkins said. It will not, however, be the same as services offered by Ames' One Heart Equestrian Therapy, which is more therapeutic. Rather, "this is more kids learning roping and doing confidence building in all things that deal with a ranch."
"This would be a working farm, not a petting zoo of any type," Brad Perkins said. "We want the kids to learn the life lessons our kids learned growing up by taking care of animals — the basic skills of working hard, doing a task, and then when done with that task, coming back for another one.
"Those are life skills that everybody needs no matter what profession they're going into, and if we can do that in a setting that puts kids at ease and helps them learn, then all the better."
Families would volunteer to go out and work on the farm together, giving the kids something to look forward to and do work that gives them an opportunity to learn. Perkins said it would be an experience "in between therapy and being out in the world on your own."
"Think of us as that training ground," Perkins said. "They'd be doing everything from cleaning stalls and taking care of animals to gathering eggs from the chickens. Things that a lot of kids don't usually have the opportunity to do, but it builds self-worth and self-confidence as well as social skills."
Perkins said his goal in teaching these life skills is to give his daughter, and other kids with different needs, a better chance at future employment.
In 2019, 19.3% of persons with a disability were employed, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In contrast, the employment-population ratio for persons without a disability was 66.3%.
"Those aren't the outcomes we want for our daughter," Brad Perkins said. "What we're hoping to do is come up with a program that teaches life skills so that those kids don't look at (that) unemployment rate when they turn into adults."
Building the barn, a community effort
The first step in realizing those goals is to build a barn to house the eight horses, six goats and various chickens, cats and pigs who will be a part of Cultivating Hope Farms' programs.
However, Brad Perkins said, the process of raising the necessary funds has been complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic and last month's derecho storm.
"This has been a challenging year for everything," he said. "At this point, I don't know what the next crisis is going to be ... it's made fundraising difficult, it's made building difficult and it's made networking difficult."
The cost of building a barn accessible to all individuals with an ADA compliant bathroom — as well as shelter and fencing for the animals, building supplies and equipment, utility implementation, and a paved driveway and parking lot — was budgeted at $35,000 earlier this year.
But, "the price of lumber just doubled or tripled in the last couple of weeks," due to the derecho storm, Brad Perkins said, so the cost is "probably considerably higher now."
Over the past month, the organization had held "Social for a Cause" events to try and raise some of the needed funds. Those events were canceled for the remainder of September to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus in Story County.
Already, they said, they've been amazed by the amount of community support they've seen. Earlier this week, Fareway Stores donated some lumber. And last month, Bobcat of Ames donated their trencher to be used by the organization for the water line.
They hope other members of the community can help them secure needed resources, volunteer time and talent, and make monetary donations.
