Turn-About Ranch is committed to providing experiences that help develop healthy values. Charity is a value upon which most healthy values stand and often opens doors for personal awareness and change. So, Turn-About Ranch provides regular opportunities for its student to exercise charity in the form of service to others. They volunteer at the local Food Bank and look for opportunities to serve members of the community through simple acts of service that include such things as shoveling snow, chopping wood, weeding gardens for those in need. They have helped build the town’s Little League field, planted trees at the medical clinic, and volunteered time to clean and manicure the grounds of a local Heritage Center. “Each student who attends Turn-About Ranch has opportunities to serve in one capacity or another,” says Executive Director Michelle Lindsay. “Service is an integral aspect of our program.”
Most recently, Turn-About Ranch students were found participating in Utah’s Adopt a Highway Project on their local Highway 12. Turn-About Ranch has volunteered to keep a section of Highway 12 clean and a group of students spent a day cleaning up litter from the sides of the road. Students expressed gratitude for the opportunity to “give back to this beautiful place we’ve called home.” One student explained, “It was a bonding experience to work with the girls. It just feels good to contribute to the community and clean up the world. People forget how important that is. I’m glad we were able to step up and make a difference.”
In a Letter to the Editor of The Insider newspaper, a local resident wrote in support of all the good that Turn-About and its students offer the community. Karen Munson’s letter was printed on May 23, 2018, stating, “[Turn-About Ranch] students provide needed services such as landscaping and helping to maintain the clinic grounds, helping at Care and Share, and freeing our highways of litter.” Michelle Lindsay responded, “It is nice that community members recognize the contributions of our program. However, the real reward is in the character and esteem-building that occurs with each of our students as they serve someone or something beyond themselves.”
Values, such as charity and service to others, continue to be a part of the Turn-About Ranch program. The impact of such acts of service are evident in the local community and in the quality of growth and change with each of its students. Evidence that Mahatma Gandhi spoke truth when he said, “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”
About Turn-About Ranch
Turn-About Ranch is a wilderness therapy and residential treatment program located in the heart of Southern Utah’s canyon country. Students experience life on a real working ranch while undergoing treatment to improve their life back home. Surrounded by multiple national parks and the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Turn-About Ranch is the ideal location for youth of today to have the space they need to find healing and purpose.