From the President
It’s been a few months since I’ve taken time to put some thoughts in a newsletter. It’s cold this morning for the tail end of March, 28 degrees here, so I’m going to take a shot at a newsletter rather than going outside to find another project.
Let’s go back to last November as a place to start. At our November OHC meeting, we elected club officers for 2025. Most positions stayed the same except for Vice President. Myself, Chris Streitenberger, will remain on as President, Sue Keller Secretary, Margaret Hite Treasurer, and the new Vice President is Bryan Black. Tom McGuire will remain as our trail boss. This is an awesome group of people that I feel very blessed to be working with for our club.
I would like to recognize Margaret Hite who in addition to our local club Treasurer, is also the State OHC Treasurer. That’s a big load to carry, but I am 100 % confident Margaret is up to the task.
In January we started working on our ride and camp schedule for 2025. Several ideas were tossed out with further discussion scheduled for the February or March meeting. One idea I floated was to locate a local charity, hopefully connected to horses, that we might be able to help support with a financial donation. Ideas were solicited with further discussion scheduled at a future meeting.
A few days after the January meeting, Bryan Black called me with an idea for the charitable donation. In Delaware, Ohio there is a program called Stockhands Horses for Healing. This program offers  a wide variety of services ranging from handicapped kids, to Veterans and First Responders plus everyone in between. They use their horses as a tool to assist their clients with their emotional and physical issues. We scheduled one of their representatives to come speak at our February meeting. Unknown to me, the NFL also scheduled the Super Bowl the same evening as our February meeting. I thought that was rude. But, Nonetheless, we went ahead with our meeting where we had 39 members in attendance. The owner of the Stockhands organization showed up at our meeting and gave a great presentation of their current programs and future needs. After our guest speaker left we kicked around the Stockhands program and unanimously voted to proceed with plans to raise money earmarked for a donation to this organization. More on this later.
With a guess speaker the business portion of our February meeting was very short. Fast forward to our March meeting, where we had a lot on our plate to kick around. I promised to stay focused, which is sometimes a challenge for me, but I made it known that the meeting might run late. Fourty-one members showed up for the meeting. I’m guessing most just to see if I could stay focused.
We did finalize our summer activity schedule which is now posted on our web page. If you are not familiar with our web page, google ffohc.com. That will take you to our home page and select Calendar.
At this same meeting, we recognized some our members and our club for accomplishments related to 2024 activities. One program we work hard at is keeping track of miles and or hours ridden at the various state forest and parks as well as at home and out of state. This information is important to the state ODNR when they try to justify request for money. Prove your needs so to speak. Last year the total of all state OHC clubs turned in was over 314,000 miles. Of the 996 OHC member that turned in miles, Fairfield County OHC had 3 members in the top 10. Old Jim McGuire was 7th in the state with 2,021 mile. Jamie McGuire was 8th with 2,015 miles and Sam Underhill was 10th with  1,713 miles. Congrats to these members and to everyone else that turned in miles. This leads me to my next item. Fairfield County OHC as a total logged 21,215 miles which placed us second in the state for all the clubs that turned in miles. Yeah !
Let me moves to a couple state-related items. New this year is a program targeted toward our youth. It is called, Youth Ambassador Program. Theresa Nikodym, one of our secondary members, jumped in and volunteered to be a mentor for this new program. A variety of programs give our youth the opportunity to earn points toward recognition at the end of the year. You can contact Theresa for more info. If you have a youth 4-H age, check into this program.
Money? Mary Alice Kuhn and Nancy Strayer have worked hard through OTP ( Ohio Trail Partnership ) of which we are one of five partners, to access state grant money. Back in November, HB2 allocated $5,000,000 dollars to OTP of which OHC received access to $1,000,000 of it. This was capital gains money which came with a large number of stipulations and requirements. OHC was to screen possible interested projects then recommend four projects to ODNR. At that point, each of the selected projects were on their own to apply for the money. ODNR was designated by legislature to over see the grant process. If all goes well, the selected projects have until June 2026 to complete the work.
Southern Ohio had two projects our state OHC organization felt worthy of consideration. The city of Jackson was given the go ahead to apply for a grant to upgrade the equine trails at Hammertown Lake. Vinton County was also given the green light to apply for money to complete the Rails to Trails project near Zaleski State Forest. Several miles of this project were completed approximately three years ago. It has been open for use starting at the Moonville Tunnel going east. The requested money, if approved, was to complete the remaining four miles going west to the little town of Zaleski. Hopefully additional money will come our way in the future, but this is a great start.
I’ll keep everyone in the loop regarding the charitable contribution project. Plans are still being developed to raise funds for it. If you have ideas as to how we can raise money, I’m all ears.
In approximately 10 days the State Forest equine trails and state camps will reopen. Get your brushes out and clean the ponies up, it’s time to ride again.
I’ve rambled long enough. Hope to see everyone on the trails soon.
Chris
