A groundbreaking innovation brings mobility to thousands.
Don with Beauty, 4, who was born with disabled feet. (Collins Kaumba/WV)
After working for years designing medical equipment, Don Schoendorfer was dissatisfied. The engineer from Irvine, Calif., would labor to come up with something better than his competitors, only to watch them turn around and produce something that topped his product. He felt as if he were on a meaningless treadmill—simply trying to make one company more profitable than another.
But then Don learned that an estimated 100 million people in the world are forced to crawl in the dirt for lack of a wheelchair. And he wondered if this might be his chance to make better use of his talents. “One of the images that I brought back from vacation in Morocco,” he says, “was this woman lying on the ground crawling—using fingernails for traction, clothes ragged and knees bleeding.”
Don discovered that the cost of a traditional wheelchair is beyond the means of many in the developing world. Also, those chairs are often unsuitable. So he founded the nonprofit Free Wheelchair Mission to provide robust, low-cost wheelchairs using parts readily available in the developing world, such as bicycle tires.
Don’s first design worked well but could not be adjusted for children. He developed a new model, collaborating with Dr. Susan Shore, a professor of physical therapy, and Motivation, an organization helping disabled people achieve mobility. This fully adjustable chair costs about $70—a fraction of the cost of regular wheelchairs. That savings is possible, in part, because the chair does not need to collapse. Intended beneficiaries seldom stow their wheelchairs in vehicles. So the chair is cheaper, stronger, and less prone to failure.
This year, World Vision began distributing about 6,000 chairs for free in Africa and Central America. Don says the partnership with World Vision is a good one because of the organization’s long-term commitment to the communities it serves. It means there are trained World Vision staff nearby to properly adjust and maintain the chairs.
For Don, it was an emotional experience attending the first distributions in Zambia, where children often suffer from cerebral palsy or polio—conditions that often can be prevented with better medical care. Most had to be physically carried off buses to attend the distributions. As they sat in their new wheelchairs, Don says, you could almost see the burden lifted from the shoulders of watching family members. For most beneficiaries, it was the first time in their lives that they had been able to move independently.