[This is part of The Work That Matters, a Plain Speaking Communications series spotlighting nonprofits doing exceptional work and the communications challenges that come with it.]
I’ve loved horses my entire life, and I’ve always been drawn to resilience, in animals and in people. Both can surprise you when given the right conditions to try again.
Years ago, when I lived in California, I came across a news story that cemented both convictions. It showed a Black man inside a prison yard, standing in a round pen with a wild mustang. He was gentling the horse, moving slowly, reading the animal, earning its trust inch by inch. What I remember most wasn’t the technique but the expression of joy on his face. Here was a man doing something that mattered, and both he and the horse knew it.
Two Populations Nobody Wanted
The Mustangs of America Foundation (MAF) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded in 2007 by Lynda Sanford. Its mission operates on two levels simultaneously: rescue wild mustangs from an uncertain fate, and give incarcerated people a path forward. MAF supports inmate mustang training programs in Nevada, Arizona, and California, including at the Rio Cosumnes Correctional Center in Sacramento County, the first BLM partnership with a county jail, established in 2013.
The Bureau of Land Management rounds up wild mustangs from overpopulated herds on federal lands, where left unmanaged, these animals face starvation, disease, or worse. MAF works with correctional facilities to bring those horses to prison yards, where inmates, most with no horse experience, learn to gentle them. Nobody breaks these animals. The prisoners earn their trust through consistency, patience, and the willingness to start over when something goes wrong.
The Results Speak for Themselves
Early program data from Arizona show that inmates who complete the program return to prison at roughly 15 percent, compared to the state’s overall recidivism rate of about 40 percent. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a result.
Through its scholarship initiative, eligible parolees can pursue professional certification at the Leach Colt Starting Academy, graduating with credentials and the tack they need to launch a career. The program doesn’t just rehabilitate. It creates a workforce pipeline.
The program’s founding trainer, Randy Helm, put it simply: training horses is a process, and life is a process. That philosophy has carried forward under current head trainer Indy O’Connor, who took over when Helm retired in 2020. The same qualities that make someone a good horse trainer, including patience, self-regulation, and the ability to read another being’s needs, turn out to be exactly what reentry demands.
Where the Communications Work Needs to Happen
MAF has a genuinely powerful story without the communications infrastructure to tell it consistently or strategically.
The 15 percent recidivism figure is nowhere on the homepage. The Boot Barn partnership, which included a Hulu fashion show in Nashville in November 2024 featuring Jelly Roll as MAF’s celebrity advocate, is treated as a footnote rather than the fundraising catalyst it should be. The social media footprint tells the same story. MAF’s Facebook page has just over 3,000 likes with minimal engagement, and the organization has no verified Instagram or LinkedIn presence. For a mission that attracted a Hulu platform and a celebrity with millions of fans across platforms, that gap is staggering. The organization’s California program at RCCC goes essentially unmentioned in California-facing outreach, despite the state’s size as a donor market and its active criminal justice reform conversation. With an all-volunteer team filing a 990-N, the fundraising infrastructure is still catching up to the mission.
Three things would move the needle:
- Lead with the people, not just the horses. The dual transformation story, two populations society has written off rebuilding trust together, is the most arresting fundraising narrative MAF has, and it’s not front and center. A comprehensive communications program would build that story into every channel, website, social, email, and funder outreach, with consistent messaging that connects the mission to measurable outcomes.
- Put the outcome data where funders can find it. That recidivism comparison belongs on the homepage, in grant applications, and in every donor communication, not buried in a radio interview.
- Build a California strategy. With a program already operating at RCCC and criminal justice reform at the top of the state’s policy agenda, MAF has a credible foothold it isn’t using. A targeted content and outreach strategy aimed at California funders, foundations, and criminal justice reform advocates could open significant new revenue streams.
- Capitalize on the Jelly Roll moment. A Hulu platform and a celebrity with millions of fans across platforms is a once-in-a-generation awareness opportunity. Without the social infrastructure to capture and convert that attention into donors and supporters, it’s exposure without return. Building that infrastructure now, before the next opportunity arrives, is exactly the kind of work that separates organizations that grow from those that stay small.
The Story Matches the Mission. The Communications Need to Catch Up
That man in the round pen has stayed with me for decades because what his face showed wasn’t happiness exactly. It was recognition, the look of someone discovering they’re capable of something they didn’t know they had in them.
That’s what rehabilitation looks like when it works, and that’s the kind of story that deserves to be told clearly, consistently, and to the right audiences.