President’s Update: We're Reaching more Riders
Hello and welcome to our second newsletter for 2026.
We have just started Term 3 and have held several volunteer training days at the barn to get our volunteers and horses back into the flow.
I would especially like to welcome all our new volunteers, and our new riders and non-riders and announce we have some exciting news that means we can Reach more Riders and Change more Lives!
We have been planning for some years to extend our riding days to include Friday once we could muster the volunteer and rider support. To-date we have operated Monday to Thursday but from this term we are pleased to announce that we are now offering riding sessions on Fridays!
Making up these additional rides, we are excited to have some new riders joining us as well as several returning riders. We have a group of new volunteers who are going to be helping on Fridays, with a small cohort of experienced volunteers to assist them. Our new coach, Kate Bicknell-Young, will be running the Friday sessions. Kate is an experienced RDA coach, having lived and coached in the Wairarapa for many years. She and her husband have returned to this area, and we are very happy Kate has offered to join our group.
This is a major step for us at NSRDA in our ongoing goal to ‘Reach More Riders, Change more Lives’. Reducing from four rides a day to three rides in Term one this year has proven very successful to increase safety and reduce stress – our coaches, volunteers and horses are loving it! It has also resulted in a significant drop in income from rider fees. Adding Fridays, and our two new unmounted sessions on Thursdays, has brought us almost back up to 64 rides per week , but more is required and more on this later.
It is a difficult task to find new horses but we have been fortunate to add two magical new horses, Harley and Toots, and they have settled in well to their new home and are being ridden in our sessions.
We have been actively fundraising as our costs have increased significantly this year with the cost-of-living crisis affecting us, plus, we have a few more mouths to feed now!
We held a cake sale at Bunnings in Silverdale (who are one of our wonderful sponsors) earlier this month, which raised a lot of money for us. More on this later in our newsletter. However, we still have to keep on fundraising and welcome any ideas.
Thanks to all of you who give your time and energy to North Shore RDA, it is very much appreciated. We hope you enjoy the Newsletter.
Christine Fallas
President
