06/11/2025
Katie and Jessica, MTR’s Mental Health Program Manager and Operations Manager, participated in the Eagala Advanced Practice: Skillset Intensive Training at the Baltimore County Agricultural Center. This is a 3-day program for experienced Eagala practitioners, focused on refining skills and deepening understanding of equine-assisted psychotherapy. It offered them an opportunity to grow both personally and professionally while strengthening their core skills that support MTR’s equine-assisted psychotherapy services.
“It was a gift to be able to further deepen our equine assisted psychotherapy facilitation skills by attending Advanced Eagala Practice: Skillset Intensive Training. Patti and Randy Mandrell, our Eagala trainers, are seasoned leaders in the industry and offered a wealth of information, practice, and feedback. The training connected MTR’s value of commitment to growth with Eagala’s value of continuous improvement through growing our skills to enable us to provide high quality, professional, and effective services, and make the most positive impact to our participants through a commitment to excellence. We were reminded that excellence isn’t a place you arrive at, but one that is continuously developed with intentionality and integrity.
This training helped us as facilitation teams with our horses to gain awareness in the present moment to our own blocks and challenges, while providing experiential practice to find our own solutions – the epitome of what we hope to provide to our participants in sessions. It left us excited to bring tools back to MTR to support our other team members and participants!”
-Katie Streett, MS, LGPC, MTR Mental Health Program Manager, Eagala Mental Health Provider, Eagala Equine Specialist, PATH Intl. Advanced Instructor
“What an opportunity it was to attend the Advanced Eagala Practice: Skillset Intensive Training this past week! Alongside MTR’s Therapy Program Manager, Katie Streett, a group of fellow Eagala-certified professionals—and, of course, some incredible equine partners!—I had the chance to explore the Eagala model through an advanced lens. We learned and refined advanced facilitation techniques and deepened our understanding of the core skills we each brought to the training.
On our final day, one of the trainers remarked, “Eagala can be a way of life,” and that sentiment really resonated. I'm returning to the farm with valuable skills, meaningful insights, and new perspectives that will not only help to enhance the Equine-Assisted Psychotherapy services we offer to the community at MTR, but will also help to strengthen our organization’s intentionality across all areas.
I’m grateful for such an impactful opportunity for personal and professional learning this past week, and am proud to have been able to represent MTR, an organization with a deep commitment to growth—always in pursuit of raising the bar in all that we do.”
-Jessica Mitchell, MTR Operations Manager, Eagala Equine Specialist, PATH Intl. Advanced Instructor
