| Biography |
Tina Meekins is the founder and president of The Whole Horse Place, a non profit organization in Port Orchard, WA. She has always been driven by her love for old horses and kids with nowhere else to go. She has a special connection with foster kids and teenagers who are struggling, perhaps because she was once that teenager herself.
When she was a child, she read “Black Beauty” by Anna Sewell. At the end of the book, when Black Beauty was an old horse with nowhere to go, Joe saves him. Tina decided then that she wanted to be Joe someday.
Eventually, when she grew up, she had two horses. When the economy tanked in 2008, she could not feed them, so she told people they could come and enjoy and learn about them in exchange for a bale of hay. She didn’t know what she was doing, so she used the 4H Horse program as a guide. Soon after, a friend’s daughter was killed, and when she brought her grandchildren over to drop them off for one of the children’s horse “lesson,” Tina told her to leave all six of them. They ended up staying at the barn all day for a week, and our “Ranch Hand” program was born. The peace and respite that these horses gave those children that week cemented in her heart that horses help people. And why not? They also helped Tina recover her identity when she escaped a cult. The horses were/are fundamental to her sobriety when she stopped drinking the same month that she opened the barn doors to these kids. It gave her a purpose in which she could use her experience, strength, and hope to help.
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