Laura Spielman

I attribute my success to passion and belief. When you truly believe in something, not just intellectually, but in your bones, you find a way to make it happen even when the path is unclear. Passion is what gets you up before sunrise to be with the horses. Belief is what keeps you going when the funding is uncertain or the work is hard.

But if I am being honest, my greatest measure of success has nothing to do with traditional metrics. It is not a number on a spreadsheet or a grant awarded or a program milestone reached. My measure of success is the look on someone's face when they leave. The way a person's shoulders drop when they have been with the horses. The moment a veteran who has been braced for years finally exhales. The child with special needs who makes a connection they have never made before and looks up with pure joy. The incarcerated person who walks back through that gate standing a little taller than when they arrived. That is my metric. Happiness. Relaxation. Co-regulation. The quiet but unmistakable shift that happens when someone feels safe, seen, and met exactly where they are. The horses make that possible. My job is simply to create the conditions for it and then get out of the way.

Success, to me, is impact. One person at a time. Every single time.

One of the best pieces of career advice I have ever received was simple but profound: figure out what makes your soul happy.

That one sentence changed everything for me. It sounds almost too simple, and yet most of us spend years, sometimes decades, building careers around what we are good at or what makes sense on paper rather than what genuinely lights us up from the inside. I was no different. I had a successful career. I was capable and accomplished. And I was also searching for something I could not quite name.

It was during one of the harder seasons of my life that I found equine therapy. I was not looking for it exactly. But when I encountered it, something in me recognized it immediately. That is the only way I can describe it. My soul knew before my mind caught up.

Everything that followed grew from that moment. The Rosie Project was not built from a business plan or a market analysis. It was built from that recognition, that sense of finally being exactly where I was supposed to be, doing exactly what I was meant to do.

The best career advice I can pass along is the same advice I was given. Do not just chase success or security or even passion in the conventional sense. Go deeper. Find the work that feels like yours. Find what makes your soul happy. Because when you do, it stops feeling like a career and starts feeling like a calling. And there is nothing more powerful than a person who has found their calling.

Develop a thick skin and keep walking forward.

This industry is beautiful and meaningful and also deeply challenging. Success does not come quickly here. It comes through consistency, resilience, and an unwavering commitment to showing up even when progress is slow and the path feels uncertain. A lot of people enter this field full of passion and leave before they ever see the full impact of what they were building. Do not be one of them.

Stay committed to your values. Stand firmly in what you believe. And build your work around what is genuinely, authentically yours.

I run The Rosie Project from a strictly scientific and evidence-based perspective because that is what feels true to me. This field holds a wide spectrum of approaches. There is a great deal of spirituality, mysticism, and energy work woven through equine-assisted practice. Crystals, feathers, mudras. I respect every practitioner who connects with that approach and believes it serves their clients. It is simply not how I choose to build my work. And that distinction matters.

Your conviction in business comes directly from authenticity. If you genuinely believe in what you are doing, that belief becomes the foundation that holds everything up when things get hard. And things will get hard. Funding falls through. Programs get canceled. People question your methods. In those moments, the only thing that keeps you moving is the certainty that what you are doing is real, it is right, and it is yours.

Pick what you believe in. Build from there. And do not let anyone talk you out of it.

Funding. That is the honest answer and I do not think I am alone in saying it.

The programs that matter most in this field — restorative justice work, literacy initiatives, support for veterans and first responders — all require sustained financial investment. And the populations who need these services most are rarely the ones who can pay for them. Incarcerated individuals, veterans navigating invisible wounds, children with special needs — these are not client bases that generate revenue. They are human beings who deserve access to healing, and making that access possible requires funding from the outside.

What I want to be clear about is this: the business itself is not my struggle. Finding clients, building programs, demonstrating impact — that part works. The Rosie Project has proven that there is a need and that what we do meets it. What I wrestle with constantly is securing the financial support to sustain and expand the work that serves the people who need it most. That gap between what is possible and what is funded is where I live every day.

And yet that gap is also the opportunity. There is growing recognition across sectors — healthcare, criminal justice, education, military — that traditional interventions alone are not enough. Equine-assisted healing is no longer on the fringe. The evidence base is building. The conversations are shifting. For organizations like The Rosie Project, this moment represents a real opening to bring what we do into broader institutional partnerships and funding streams.

The need is there. The proof is there. Now we need the resources to match.

Authenticity. Presence. Honesty. Showing up honestly. These are not just professional values for me. They are the way I try to move through the world every single day.

At the core of everything I do is a belief in meeting people exactly where they are, without expectations and without judgment. That sounds simple. It is actually one of the hardest things a human being can practice consistently. We are wired to categorize, to assess, to arrive at an interaction already forming conclusions. I work against that constantly, in the arena, in the programs, and in my own life.

Honesty is woven through all of it. Honesty with the people I serve. Honesty about what this work can and cannot do. Honesty with myself about why I do it. The horses demand it too. They do not respond to performance or pretense. They respond to what is real. Working alongside them every day has made me a more honest person, in ways I did not anticipate when I started this journey.

And that honesty does not stay at the gate when I go home. I believe that the most important relationships in our lives deserve the same level of genuine presence we would give to anyone else. Our spouses and partners. Our children. Our parents. Our friends. Our family. These are the people who see all of us, not just the version we present to the world. They deserve our full honesty, even when it is uncomfortable. Especially when it is uncomfortable.

I think we sometimes reserve our most polished, patient, and present selves for strangers and colleagues, and bring our most distracted, guarded selves home to the people we love most. I am not immune to that. But I am conscious of it. Honesty in close relationships is not just about telling the truth. It is about showing up without armor. Being willing to say the hard thing. Staying in the conversation when it gets difficult. That kind of honesty is what builds real trust, and real trust is the foundation of every relationship worth having.

It does not matter whether I am sitting with someone who is incarcerated, a veteran carrying wounds that have never been named, or a child with special needs who is just trying to find their footing in the world. Every person who walks through our gate deserves to be met as a full human being. Not as a case. Not as a demographic. As a person.

That belief extends into everyday life as well. I think about the person who serves you at a restaurant. Ask their name. Look them in the eye. Acknowledge that they are a human being who showed up today just like you did. These are small acts, but they are not small. They are the practice of treating every life as though it matters, because it does.

I learned these lessons across a lifetime of experiences that humbled me, opened me, and ultimately led me to this work. They are not values I arrived at easily. They are values I earned. And they guide every choice I make, in the arena and out of it.