Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/1283777
90 S E P T E M B E R /O C T O B E R 2 0 2 0 | U N TAC K E D boyfriend. She made her first trip to Puerto Rico in 1995 when Category 5 Hurricane Luis left the island in need of equine medical supplies. "The guy that owned the training center Hacienda Siesta Alegre offered me a job," says Kelley. "He's like, 'Oh, British people are so good with horses.' I was like, 'No, I'm going back to St. Maarten. I like it there.' " But Kelley took him up on the offer eight months later and made a permanent move to Puerto Rico. She worked for Greg Jackson at Hacienda Siesta Alegre, where he and his wife Linda Jackson prioritized retraining the retired race horses they bred. "If they couldn't race anymore at the track, they'd bring them back and train them for either hunter/jumpers or dressage," says Kelley. "[Greg] had gotten many others over the years, so what we did was start up a program with him called Save The Horses." Save The Horses, founded in 2010, rehomed over 100 Thoroughbreds before Kelley's 2012 departure, when she left to start up equine physical therapy program Equi Blu Therapies. In 2016 she got a call from Gagnon- Blodgett, who needed help rehoming Immortal Wink, an 11-year-old Thoroughbred with 139 starts. Gagnon-Blodgett, Kelley and Immortal Wink's co-breeder Kathy Von Gerhard worked together to raise funds to transport the horse from Puerto Rico to the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation's farm at the Ocala, Florida, Lowell Correctional Facility. Following the success of finding Immortal Wink a home, Gagnon-Blodgett approached Kelley with a proposal. "She was like, 'Why is Save The Horses not a 501(c)(3)? Why don't you do more because you try and help so many horses?' " says Kelley. "I had never really thought about it because I didn't really have any support or help here. Greg wasn't really interested in making a big thing out of it, and I didn't have anybody helping me. I thought about it, and I'm like, 'Oh my God, I saved hundreds of horses and rescued these horses. We probably should do something official.' So that's how it happened. [Gagnon-Blodgett] decided she wanted to be a part of it and said that she would help me." Gagnon-Blodgett found her way into CHARITY SPOTLIGHT Rehoming off-the-track Thoroughbreds is a race against the clock for the Caribbean Thoroughbred Aftercare program, which has a 365-day window to rehabilitate each horse.