Ayden Schain

Program Director | Event Rider | Sport Horse Starter

Ayden Schain is an event rider and sport horse trainer blending performance horsemanship with purpose-driven work. Through a nonprofit mustang program, she focuses on gentling and saddle-starting American mustangs for careers in the sport horse industry—proving they are versatile, durable, and capable partners. 
By pairing mustang development with her own sport horse starting business, Ayden is committed to rehoming, education, and competition, creating pathways for mustangs to thrive in sport homes and reshaping how these horses are seen in the competitive world.

Dawn Barclay, MD, MBA

Founder | Executive Director

Dawn grew up in poverty in rural Missouri and Kentucky. A kid on welfare who left a difficult home at thirteen and rebuilt her life through sheer determination. 
That origin shaped everything that followed.
She went on to earn her MD from Harvard Medical School and an MBA from Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, training as a board-certified surgeon and critical care physician. 
For over a decade she has served as Medical Director of the Portsmouth Regional Hospital ICU. Along the way she founded student organizations at Harvard, interned with NGOs in South Africa, and never stopped looking for ways to connect medicine, community, and people who get left behind.
In 2023, she co-founded Sparrowhawk Equine Partners to bring horses to at-risk youth and partner with Foundation House on equine-assisted mental health programming. The mission evolved into Western Maine Mustang to focus on wild mustangs and the people who need them most.
She also serves on the board of the River Fund, supporting after-school programming and scholarships for financially at-risk youth in western Maine, and is a founding member of Next Furlong, a 501(c)3 creating pathways for horses to find purposeful homes.
Dawn has invested over 4,000 volunteer hours into this work. She lives in Bethel, Maine, with her husband, six children, seven cats, twenty-two horses, and twenty-eight chickens.

Heidi Marotta

Volunteer

Heidi Marotta has been a volunteer at WMM since the fall of 2024 and consults on the IT and the volunteer programs at Western Maine Mustang. She participates in horse husbandry and best loves seeing horses content to interact with humans who treat them with love and kindness.