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By Kate Daly
Special to The Almanac
“This is the best job I’ve ever had — I can’t imagine anything better,” Gari Merendino said upon retiring as executive director of the National Center for Equine Facilitated Therapy in Woodside, a title he held for the past decade.
He didn’t exactly handpick his successor, but he knew Nancy Contro when she was director of the family guidance and bereavement program at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital and brought out groups to experience the healing power of horses at NCEFT’s 12-acre facility.
Last spring, he asked if she was interested in applying for his job, and after a couple of weeks of self-reflection she replied that she might be ready to make a change.
Contro became NCEFT’s executive director on Jan. 7; Merendino plans to stay on the board of directors.
This is a “dream job” for Contro, where she gets “to join an unbelievable team in an incredible setting,” and combine serving families and working with animals outdoors “in a very healing place,” she said.
As for Merendino, he is looking forward to a more leisurely pace with his wife, Ellen, at their home in Southern California. He grew up there and is already involved with a public-benefit nonprofit — this one also involving horses — in Pasadena.
The couple have lived in Menlo Park for the last 34 years. She retired in June as business manager for Stanford University’s alumni magazine, so now they are both ableto travel more.
Merendino, 68, started out volunteering at NCEFT in 2005. At the time, after working for Levi Strauss in San Francisco for 13 years, he discovered one day that his job was gone.
“I had two kids in college, was making mortgage and car payments,” and had never had the time to volunteer, he said.
He remembered how much he liked riding horses after college, and came across NCEFT, a program whose mission is to help people with neuromuscular, cognitive and sensory-processing disorders move beyond their boundaries with horses, hope and healing.
He started out as a side walker, a person who stands at the ready when patients are on horseback, and found satisfaction helping others. In addition to his volunteer work, he managed a design company, did some consulting, and then “everything pretty much fell into place” when NCEFT asked him to ride the horses it uses in its therapy program, he said.
Merendino went from the position of horse handler to barn manager, and then director of operations in 2007 when NCEFT moved to its current site at 880 Runnymede Road.
The following year he became executive director, and found himself always fundraising to keep the 14 therapy horses fed and taken care of, the staff of 21 paid, and the approximately 5,000 annual sessions for patients running smoothly year-round.
Founded in 1971, NCEFT has a long waitlist of people seeking physical, occupational and speech therapy. The fee is usually $113 for a half-hour session, “but it costs us close to $300 to do this,” Merendino said.
How does the nonprofit fill the funding gap? By lining up private donations, applying for grants, and renting out stall space to about 17 boarders.
“I’m proudest of the relationships we’ve developed with other nonprofits,” such as the Lava Lake Injured Veterans Equine Program in Idaho, the Veterans Administration in Palo Alto, Children’s Health Council, Abilities United, Hope Services, and various school groups, Merendino said.
In the spring, veterans suffering from traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder spend time at NCEFT to train for a summer trail ride in Idaho.
One day Merendino drove by an accident on Sand Hill Road where a firetruck, an ambulance and sheriff’s personnel were swarming the scene. He figured they see trauma every day, and decided to add an equine-assisted therapy program for first responders at NCEFT.
“We never charge veterans or first responders because they’ve given so much for us,” he said.
About 75 percent of NCEFT’s patients are kids, the youngest being 2 years old. So far the oldest special needs patient has been 95.
“Everybody we talk to says what a difference this place has made to them … the relationship between patients and horses — it is amazing,” he said.
Merendino enjoyed being able to ride his quarter horse, Keys, at NCEFT every day, and smiles when he explains how grateful he is for a job that kept him emotionally and physically well for so many years.
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