Doing a Good Turn With Old Wheelchairs

In the corner of a Simi Valley warehouse sit rows of small children’s wheelchairs, close to 200 of them.

Battered and weathered, they will be packed into a tractor-trailer Saturday and shipped to Iowa, where they will be spiffed up and sent around the world--to Vietnam, to Romania and to Guatemala.

For disabled children in those developing countries, whose lives have been limited to sitting or crawling, the wheelchairs will offer a first chance to get around on their own.

The children’s liberator is a man named David Richard, and his newfound devotion to collecting wheelchairs is the latest step in an eight-year family journey.

Richard, 40, is in the process of casting aside his 10-year-old golf course equipment business to create a nonprofit organization he calls Wheels for Humanity, which collects old wheelchairs that would otherwise end up in landfills.

His goal is to find at least 200 a month.

“One of the greatest benefits of this is picking up a Maya girl out of the dirt and putting her in a wheelchair for the first time,” says Richard, who lives in Studio City.

Collecting the wheelchairs is a struggle in logistics. Richard estimates that he spends 10 hours a week on the phone seeking wheelchairs and charitable shippers to take them to the repair center in Iowa. Sometimes he borrows the van from his church to pick up wheelchairs. Other times, Sam’s U-Rent in North Hollywood lends him trucks for free.

On Monday, Richard picked up a couple of wheelchairs from the Lowman School in North Hollywood. On Tuesday, he drove 300 miles to Modesto for 30 wheelchairs from California Children’s Services. Wednesday was the 300-mile trip back. On Thursday, he circled down to Stanton in Orange County for 20 wheelchairs, then up to Pasadena for about 10 more.

The wheelchair program began in 1988 when one of Richard’s five brothers, Mark, was in Guatemala. He saw a woman crawling through the dust of the Pan American Highway, and remembered a childhood friend whose limbs had been paralyzed by polio.

“When I saw this woman, I thought of my friend Carl without a wheelchair,” Mark Richard said. “He would be helpless. I made up my mind I was going to get this lady a wheelchair.”

When he returned to his hometown of Madison, Wis., Mark and the local chapter of the National Spinal Cord Injury Assn. gathered 20 wheelchairs. He lashed them to the top of a trailer and drove back to Guatemala, where he gave one to the person he had seen crawling, a 35-year-old woman named Macaria.

“It provided her with dignity,” he said.

A new wheelchair usually costs more than $600, a year’s earnings in many parts of the world.

Mark Richard gave three other wheelchairs to men he saw crawling amid the traffic on Guatemala City streets. The rest he gave to other disabled people in Macaria’s town.

He repeated the trip to Guatemala twice a year, taking leave from his job as shipping manager of a greenhouse. Each time, he would find 20 to 40 wheelchairs, scrounge together vans or trucks--even modified school buses--and enlist volunteers to help him.

In the past few years, Mark Richard has collaborated with two Christian organizations, JAF Ministries in Agoura Hills and Hope Haven in Rock Valley, Iowa, where he now lives. They took over much of the administrative burden, allowing him to expand wheelchair collecting to a full-time job. Altogether, Mark has supervised the collection, repair and distribution of more than 1,800 wheelchairs.

Dennis Richard, the family’s oldest brother, became another of the project’s converts after going along on one of the Guatemala trips in 1992. Once home, he would call David, who had moved to Southern California, and tell him: “You’ve got to collect chairs. You’ve got to go to Guatemala with Mark.”

“Yeah,” David would answer, “but I have a family to feed. I have to work.”

At a Thanksgiving gathering at a friend’s house in Minneapolis in 1994, Dennis again nudged David to start collecting wheelchairs. But that night, Dennis Richard died in his sleep. Years of obesity and chronic health problems had taken their toll. He was 44.

At the funeral the following week in Wisconsin, David and other relatives and friends talked about how Dennis’ passion for the wheelchairs had lifted him out of a long depression. “It put light in his life,” David said.

Last July, David visited the Iowa warehouse where retired farmers, high school students and wheelchair users volunteer their time to fix the donated chairs.

“Once you put your hand on a used wheelchair, you’re hooked,” he said.

The next month, David started making the phone calls to find wheelchairs. In November, he went on his first trip to Guatemala with 130 wheelchairs, mostly adult-sized. He recalls a 10-year-old girl named Maria who had her arms wrapped around him as he lowered her into her first wheelchair. Stricken by polio, she could get around by crawling or on the back of her mother. Maria, her mother and David were all crying.

“This was the biggest event of her life,” David said.

The need for children’s wheelchairs far outstripped the 17 they had brought along, so David Richard has concentrated his current collecting efforts on them.

Like his brother Mark years before, David soon realized that he didn’t have enough time for both the wheelchairs and work.

“I’ve been doing this out of my pocket,” he said. “Financially, it’s been pretty draining.”

With the nonprofit Wheels for Humanity, he hopes to pay himself enough to be able to work full time on the wheelchair project.

“Since Denny died, he sort of lit of the fire,” Mark said. “I’m taking over where he left off.”

“It’s a great idea,” said Eric Sauter, distribution manager of VitalAir, a Burbank medical equipment firm that has donated 20 wheelchairs. “I’m glad somebody is doing it.”

Previously, VitalAir regularly threw out one or two wheelchairs a month, Sauter said. Expensive spare parts and insurance often make it cheaper to buy a new chair than to fix up an old one. Nationally, Mark Richard estimates, several hundred thousand wheelchairs a year are discarded.

Within the next few months, David Richard needs to find new warehouse space to store wheelchairs. “Landlords don’t want to give free warehouse space,” he laughed. (The company currently lending him the space in Simi Valley needs it back in April.)

He is confident that he can double the number of wheelchairs he collects each month. He wants to open a repair shop in Los Angeles to save the trouble of sending the chairs to Iowa.

“When one door closes, two doors open for us,” David said. “A door will open. I have faith. I really do. This is my life now.”