The Hairy Henry Care Farm near Bantry offers therapeutic and educational activities to support children and adults of all abilities. It was set up as a Social Enterprise in 2013 by Sandra Schmid.
A fundraiser will take place on July 27th from 12noon to 4pm at the Hairy Henry Care Farm in Ballylickey, with pony rides, face painting, donkey bingo, a raffle, a barbeque, cakes and tea, crafts, a nature walk and lots of adorable farm animals to meet. In July 2024, Sandra initiated the formation of the Hairy Henry Educational Trust to oversee fundraising for the Giddy Up and Go programme.
The trust is made up of five trustees, and over the last year, it started a GoFundMe campaign and ran three successful fundraiser days - which successfully raised eight thousand euros of the ten thousand euro target - which would enable them to run a pilot of the Giddy Up and Go programme.
Most sessions are privately funded, some are covered by Tusla, the Department of Education and the HSE. In light of an ever increasing number of young people experiencing challenges in mainstream secondary educational settings, with little outside help available to them, Sandra developed a programme to respond to this problem.
The Giddy Up and Go programme is aimed at youngsters aged 12-16 years who would benefit from an extracurricular group to support them in building self-esteem, sense of purpose and sense of achievement.
This programme is unique in its set-up and approach and relies on public funding as there is no state support available for these sort of initiatives.
Sandra’s hope is to attract enough donations from the community to be able to offer this programme free of charge to teens and their families, apart from a small registration fee.
Please come along and support this day - tickets can be booked online via www.itsplainsailing/org/hairyhenry. For more enquiries, please contact Sandra on 087-9389867.
