Saddle Up! has raised more than half of the $9 million it's trying to collect to expand its 34-acre farm on Old Hillsboro Road outside Franklin, a campaign organizers say will finally start chipping away at a waiting list that has kept families waiting months, if not longer, to get their children on a horse. The nonprofit, which teaches children with developmental disabilities to ride and care for horses, pulled in $1 million in a single week around its open house earlier this month.
Open House Draws Families to the Farm
The milestone came into focus during a November 5 open house, where visitors met the program's 23 horses, enjoyed refreshments and watched a demonstration put on by young riders, according to the Williamson Herald. Staff reporter Kelly Mayo photographed the event, which doubled as a showcase for what the money is meant to build. The campaign's goal is to cover both construction and furnishings for the expansion, with site surveys and other preliminary work already underway.
Saddle Up! CEO Tina Doniger, who took over the role in March 2026, said the planned upgrades include a student sensory room, a larger family waiting room, offices and a conference room. The project will also add a volunteer boot wash, showers and changing rooms — amenities Doniger said are overdue, since some volunteers currently change clothes in the back of their trucks. Altogether, the expansion is meant to provide more space for students, families, staff and the roughly 250 volunteers who show up each week, with completion scheduled for fall 2027.
A Waitlist Years in the Making
Board member Andrea Freeman said the extra square footage can help Saddle Up! reach more children while giving riders covered space to escape the heat and the elements. She said the expansion will help address what she described as the program's very long waiting list. That mirrors reporting from other outlets: NewsChannel 5 has reported that families currently face a wait of months to get in, while the Williamson Herald has separately described a waiting list that could stretch as long as two years — accounts that haven't been reconciled into a single figure. NewsChannel 5 reported the expansion could let the program serve 25 to 40 percent more children once complete.
Doniger told NewsChannel 5 that the idea of expanding has resurfaced for seven to 10 years, always circling back to that same long waiting period. The Williamson Herald's own reporting on the groundbreaking describes a family-centered lobby, an expanded therapy room, a multisensory room, family restrooms and a sibling play area as part of the build-out, alongside a volunteer lounge and training room featuring lockers, a boot wash and a break room. R.C. Mathews Contractor has been selected to lead the expansion, with Gensler serving as architect and interior designer, and the nonprofit has said a donation from the John R. Lindahl Foundation was necessary to get the project started.
Families Point to Two Decades of Progress
Deborah Newman's daughter Emily, who is 23 and has Down syndrome, has participated in Saddle Up! for 19 years. Deborah said the riding lessons have supported Emily's occupational, speech and physical therapy goals, and that her daughter has gained confidence, life skills and friends through the program — the kind of personal stakes that board president Brian Hubbard says the expansion is ultimately about. Hubbard said the facility improvements will benefit everyone at Saddle Up!, particularly families seeking support for their children, and that the new space will build community for volunteers and families alike.
Saddle Up! was originally created as a one-day-a-week program serving just 10 students at a time before growing into the year-round operation it is today, according to The Tennessean, which reported the program served 180 children and youth over the past year. It provides students the chance to build balance, confidence, social skills and responsibility, organizers say, a mission that has drawn more than 300 weekly volunteers according to the Williamson Herald's separate account.
Not the Only Campaign Betting Big on Therapeutic Riding
Saddle Up!'s push for new space echoes a similar capital campaign underway at Shining Stars Therapeutic Riding Program, which purchased a 60-acre horse farm at the intersection of Centennial and Bon-Ox Roads in October 2022 and broke ground on a new facility in spring 2026. That organization describes its Unbridled Future Capital Campaign, approached in phases, as an effort in the range of roughly $7 million to build a 38,000-square-foot facility that will eventually include an accessible barn with 22 horse stalls, a tack room, a veterinary room, grooming stalls and new pasture fencing, according to its own campaign materials. The comparison underscores how much capital it can take to scale up equine therapy programs built on long waiting lists and growing demand.
