The Concrete Cowboys of SW Philly Get Coverage
I have to admit, I love the website Oddity Central. It’s good as a one-stop shop for all news that’s uncanny, bizarre, or just plain strange. You also occasionally get a more “normal” story about something that’s just a little unexpected, and that was the case with the site’s recent story on the “Concrete Cowboys” of southwest Philadelphia.
Pictured is one of Malik Divers’ Concrete Cowboys, a recruitment of at-risk youth who ride and care for horses as part of an intervention to stop community violence.
Picture, if you will, South Philly. Now imagine a man in cowboy boots riding a horse down the sidewalk. It’s an incongruous image, isn’t it? Thanks to local resident Malik Divers, it’s a reality: one designed to help local youth stay out of trouble. Divers recruits at-risk teenagers from the neighborhood and lends them horses from his own stable and teaches them to ride them. The kids also offer residents $5 horse rides.
Equine therapy is used in many different ways. It’s a known fact that horses make people feel good. Divers figures that caring for and riding his horses will help the urban youth with whom he works to avoid bad decisions like dealing drugs, skipping school, or worse. He calls his teenage recruits the “Concrete Cowboys.” It’s an apt name for the inner-city teens riding beautiful horses alongside cars, trucks, and buses spewing pollution into the air.
CNN’s Great Big Story ran a piece on Divers’ stable and community intervention recently. Divers explains that he grew up around horses, and believes that they have a calming effect on the youth of Philadelphia. He explains that he sees teens on the news involved in gang violence and homicides and believes that the horses help give the kids something else on which to focus. The CNN video focuses on one cowboy in particular, Shahir Drayton. Drayton has lost family members to street violence and easily could have ended up another statistic, but he got involved with Divers’ horses when he was 10 years old and his life changed. “I can have fun and not worry about everything else that’s going on around me. If I would have never met Malik, I probably would’ve been doing stuff I wasn’t supposed to be doing, getting in trouble,” Drayton says.
