Hi my name is Tammy Rine! Rines Whitetail Foundation is a non-profit foundation that helps handicapped and mentally challenged youth experience nature’s greatness. We are committed to making outdoor dreams a reality for these young youth by providing guided hunts, activities, one on one with our animals and deer , and a place to enjoy nature with their families in a 4 day 3 night country stay at our foundation . We have lots more to offer. Please take a moment to look over our camo space site as well as our website at rineswhitetailfoundation.com We work solely on donation and volunteers which is why we work so hard to get our foundation public. We do need at this time people who would be interested in possibly giving insight or helping in other ways towards our foundation. Should you think that you may be of great help to us please contact us with what you may have to offer. Thank you in advance.
We know from experience that any child with special needs or with any kind of handicap enjoys an experience like this. We teach them hunting, fishing, camping, how to hunt for antler sheds, depending on the time of year they come to us. We have adopted 10 special needs children and we also have three biological children so a total of 13. We only have 9 children left on the home now, since the other kids have aged out & gotten married. Our oldest son still helps us at the farm.
My husband and I have both worked with children for years. We both worked at the University of Florida and have a lot of experience in this field and we both have the same desire to help special needs children in any way we can. I also worked for a school system and have gotten to work with a lot of kids as well as getting involved with foster children through them. I dealt with a lot of families that were foster parents. These were people that really cared for the children and wanted to better them through the foster parent program.
My husband is originally from Ohio and he always wanted to move back so we took a leap of faith and moved up here. Once we got up here we decided to get into the foster care ourselves. We met with a few people that did it and they would say “why don’t you do this, this is a way you could help” and so we just started to take in children and they would do a permanent custody and, well how do you not keep a child at your home? No matter what their issues are. And we worked so hard with them that they really were a part of the family, so when they went permanent custody we just kept them.
Its hard work, I wouldn’t be the first person to say “well you need to become a foster parent” but it is very rewarding and a blessing, even with it becoming harder all the time to become a foster parent, it is a very rewarding experience. Even with all of the issues that a lot of kids have from their past, making it really hard sometimes, it is worth it.
We got into raising deer after we had been fostering children for a while. We have a farm and we had horses and other animals already and my oldest son is an avid hunter, he loves everything about hunting, and we have a friend that actually opened a preserve and he kept saying to my son, who helped him out a lot, “why don’t you do this? Why don’t you start raising whitetail deer? I will get you started and give you some deer” so finally we decide to try this and combine the two. Fostering children and raising deer. We wanted to help more kids even though we are not doing foster care right now. We have the 10 children we adopted plus our biological kids and so now we kind of stopped doing foster care and try to focus on the kids we have in our home. But we still want to help children so we thought we would do the nature preserve for the kids and be able to help more children without having them all the time. It is amazing what this does and how it helps the children to be on this type of environment. To feed the animals, feed the chickens, pet the deer, bottle feed the fawns, or just simply go out in the woods and do some deer tracking and just really interact and become involved with nature on a personal level helps them more than one can imagine. It is amazing what this experience does to these kids. To simply pick up a fishing pole and sit by the pond. Unless you’re catching fish, to me, it is boring but it is so calming for the kids. One of my kids can be having an outburst and can go out and pet the horses or go fishing and 5 minutes later they have forgotten all about the outburst, forgotten why they’re mad because they are enjoying themselves. One of my daughters is bipolar, she has several diagnoses, and will kick and punch and throw things but if we tell her to go out and take care of Casey, one of the horses, to brush his mane or something she will go out there and in 5 minutes she won’t even know why she was so mad or what she was throwing her fit about.
We fund ourselves as much as possible by selling fresh doe urine, all natural. We sell fresh only and started selling it after our son’s friend had real good luck using it. We used it ourselves and when we saw that people were doing good with it we started to bottle and sell it.
Rines Whitetail Foundation is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that is committed to helping mentally and physically handicapped children’s dreams in the outdoors become a reality. Our foundation offers many opportunities to experience all that nature has to offer while relieving some of the stress that families are put under with the care and management of a special needs child.
We here at Rines Whitetail Foundation offer a one on one experience with all that mother nature has to offer. Whether it be participating in our up and coming animal therapy program, taking a guided tour through our preserve or a once in a lifetime special needs hunt, we guarantee to make it memorable.
Come and let Rines Whitetail Foundation treat you and your family to a stress free, dream granting, hunting experience here in Coshocton Ohio.
For more information please visit rineswhitetailfoundation.com or at www.camospace.com/rineswhitetailfoundation
To anyone out there that wishes to get involved with Rines Whitetail Foundation please give Tami a call or email them to see what you can do to help. They are currently looking for any help that anyone wishes to offer but especially anyone who has experience or knowledge on how to file for grants.
