20 • Philanthropy Journal of North Carolina
Focus On Philanthropy
May 1998
Where there's a wheelchair, there's a way
Lifting disabled children and adults from the middle of dusty
Guatemalan roads into refurbished wheelchairs was enough to
hook David Richard, executive director of Wheels for Humanity
based in North HoUywodd, Calif. The mission to help the disad
vantaged in Third World countries began 10 years ago.
“Seeing the faces of those people who get our wheelchairs —
that’s my paycheck,” says Richard.
Earher this year, Richard and a team of doctors made ii-ips
to Vietnam and the Ukraine to distribute more than L’tid
wheelchairs his organization helped refurbish.
In addition to giving mobihty to needy people, the
team also gives disabihty-related medical assistance
to the hundreds of people waiting and hoping for their
first wheelchair.
See a story about Wheels for Humanity on page 4.
mm2
At top, a man who lost his limbs
24 years ago from a landmine
will no longer drag himself
along the roads of Vietnam,
thanks to Wheels for Humanity.
Above, David Richard lifts young
Gasper, a polio victim, into his
first wheelchair in a Guatemalan
village as the boy's father
watches.
Above, Richard adjusts the first
wheelchair of a young Nicaraguan
woman who stepped on a landmine
three years ago.
To the left, a grateful Maria,
101 years old, told Richard the first
place she was going to go in her new
wheelchair was to church. She lives
in the Dominican Republic.
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