HAUGHTON, La. — Jamon Turner is a Colorado native who moseyed over to Shreveport and found a new purpose.
Turner first found his love of the great outdoors on his grandfather’s ranch in southern Colorado where a few times a year he would get to help out and ride horses. Turner met a family friend when he was in the third grade, Charles Sampson who was the first Black man to win a world title in bull riding. That’s when Turner changed course and set his sights on bull riding.
“It was different than what everybody else around me was doing,” Turner said. “I liked the aspect that it wasn’t a team thing, because if I did great, I did great and if I did horrible that was on me and I was the one responsible for fixing that.”
Bull riding is an intense and dangerous sport, but Turner never liked being scared of things. Whatever life threw at him, he would bite back the nerves and go all-in to conquer his fears.
Turner gave up being a traveling rodeo cowboy after an arm break, to plant roots teaching elementary kids at a Christian school in central Texas where he began letting some of the kids come over to hang out with the horses and see what his talents were used for.
Soon, Turner moved to Shreveport where he felt the need to bring something positive to a city filled with kids surrounded by crime and drugs. He found an abandoned lot where he would bring the horses and kids would come and learn to ride. Turner and the kids spent several weeks cleaning up the space to work with the horses before they were asked to leave.
“I went to talk to Chris Giordano at the fairgrounds and he was gracious enough to write me a lease to where I could use the show bars for a 10-week program there at the fairgrounds and it just catapulted after that. Juvenile services would send some kids and I would literally have some kids that just came from the city who are floating around town with nothing to do in the summertime,” Turner said.
With no funding or help coming from the city, Turner works as a horse trainer for other people and uses that money to feed his program, Just Believe.
“It takes $49,000 to keep a kid incarcerated all year long,” Turner said. “You can literally run 32 kids through my program at that for 10 weeks. Instead of having kids locked up who didn’t learn anything and back on the streets, you have a kid that’s had some sort of confinement, but he’s been in a structured organization that taught him some kind of trade that whether he decides to go back to school or not, he’s employable.”
Turner’s program is open to all children in the Shreveport area.
“Everybody needs to meet someone who is an inspiration,” explains Turner.
Turner’s next move is to find a piece of land that he can have a voluntary lease on or own himself to run the program from. If he’s able to get that, he wants the kids to help build the stables, create a community garden and continue to teach them the importance of agriculture.
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