We are so grateful to everyone who donated to Haven Acres on GivingTuesday! A total of $3,150 was raised! This helps us so much going into winter to pay for hay, vet bills, admin costs, and all the other things we have to do to make summer sessions possible. We appreciate you all so much! Thank you again!!

Ten bowlers played 3 games, got 57 sponsors, and raised $8,622! It was a fun night of fellowship, pizza, and bowling. We are so grateful for the bowlers who were brave enough to ask family and friends for support and for the donors who generously gave to support the Haven Acres ministry!

We sure are having a beautiful fall this year! As we approach winter, we are rolling out a couple of fundraisers to help support Haven Acres in the off season.

First, we are finally able to hold our Bowling for Bucks fundraiser on October 30th this year! We’d love to have a lot of you participate!

Bowling for Bucks is a fundraiser we usually have in the spring every year but due to COVID we were unable to run it as usual this year. With bowling alleys opening with sanitation precautions and social distancing in mind, we are excited to be able to host it this fall! Since we haven’t been able to do some of our usual fundraisers this year, this event will help substantially with all the costs of running Haven Acres during the winter months. This fundraiser usually raises about $8,000 dollars. We’d love it if we could hit the $10,000 mark this year, and we believe we can with your help!

Anyone who would like to participate must first come up with a goal in mind of how much they would like to raise. We ask everyone to raise a minimum of $250 dollars. Then each person will ask for sponsors for their bowling games in person, over the phone, or any other way you can think to! Sponsors can either give a flat donation or pledge to donate a certain amount per point. We realize there is less than two weeks, so we need some adults and teens to commit to going out and getting pledges/ sponsors ASAP. Please shoot us an email at info@havenacresmn.org if you intend to bowl (obtain pledges) so that we have a number in mind as we reserve the bowling lanes. The event usually runs from 6-8pm. We will let you know if anything changes once we solidify details with Bowlero in Lakeville.

By the way, Haven Acres usually provides pizza and pop for anyone bowling in the fundraiser, but we’ll have to see with COVID requirements if we’ll be able to do that this year. The participants will pay for their own bowling games and shoe rental. Usually everyone bowls 2-3 games.

We will also be posting our sweatshirt fundraiser soon, so keep your eyes open for that!

Construction of our new barn is underway!! It has been our dream for years to have a place for equipment and hay storage, a meeting space, and an office. Now in our seventh year we are getting to see that dream come to life!

While our original barn has stalls and a small indoor riding space, the riding space has been taken up with equipment storage and hay. This new barn is the same size as our original but we will be able to put the equipment and hay in there, allowing us to open up our indoor riding arena in the first barn. Hay storage is especially important for us now as we have started leasing our own hay field and are blessed to be getting large harvests of hay. So our horses will still be spending the night in our original barn when the weather is bad, no one is moving to the new barn as far as our herd goes, but it will just be more opened up to be used for them like it was originally intended!

The meeting space and office will also be a huge blessing! Up until now we have been using the Heaths’ house and it would be really nice to let them have their house for just their family. Each day that we have sessions the volunteers gather to have devotions, debrief about the day, and pray for our students, and now we will be able to do that in the new barn. The new office also means we will have all our files in one place, in real file cabinets, and we will be able to have a table or desks specifically for working at rather than using the Heaths’ dining room! The meeting space will also have a kitchenette, handicap accessible bathroom, shower, and locker room.

We are so grateful for this amazing gift from God and so grateful for the people who have donated their time and money to make this a reality! We can’t wait to show it off when it’s all done!