Three Gaits

Three Gaits is a PATH Intl. Premier Accredited therapeutic-riding nonprofit in Stoughton, Wisconsin, serving riders since 1983. Running it means coordinating three things at once that no off-the-shelf software treats as a single entity: participants and their therapeutic progress, a roster of volunteers, and a barn full of horses.

The challenge

The software used for this work is borrowed from adjacent worlds — generic scheduling tools, spreadsheets, donor CRMs — none of which is built for a therapeutic riding center. Participant outcomes lived in one place, volunteer scheduling in another, and horse health and barn compliance in a third. The coordination overhead fell on a small staff that should have been spending its time on riders, not reconciling systems.

What we built

We built Stride — the first comprehensive ERP designed specifically for therapeutic-horsemanship centers — as a single production system. Participant outcomes: goals, lesson planning, and progress tracking. Volunteer operations: scheduling, approvals, time tracking, and self-service. Horse and barn management: health records, feeding, exercise, and compliance. One platform and one source of truth, on a modern stack — Next.js, Supabase, and Postgres with row-level security, automated email and SMS — engineered to production standards with role-based access, audit logging, and an automated test suite behind it.

The result

Stride reached production in January 2026 — not a prototype, a hardened system with continuous integration and security review behind it. Three Gaits runs its participants, volunteers, and horses from one place instead of three, and a category that had always adapted other people's software finally has software built for it. It is a working example of the leverage that lets a small team build the system a niche has needed and never had.