Wheels of Hope : Studio City Man’s Collecting Efforts Give a Lift to the Needy Disabled

This morning volunteers at First Christian Church will pack about 200 children’s wheelchairs into a tractor-trailer truck bound for Iowa, where they’ll be refurbished and then sent around the world.

For disabled children in developing countries such as Vietnam, Romania and Guatemala, whose lives have been limited to sitting or crawling, the chairs will offer a first chance to get around on their own.

The children’s liberator is Studio City resident David Richard.

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.

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

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

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Richard’s newfound devotion to wheelchair collecting is the latest step of an eight-year family journey.

It began in 1988 when one of David’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 said. “He would be helpless. I made up my mind I was going to get this lady a wheelchair.”

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

“It provided her with dignity,” Mark said.

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

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

Mark repeated the trip to Guatemala twice a year, taking leave from his job as shipping manager of a greenhouse. Each time, he’d find 20, 30, 40 wheelchairs, scrounge together vans or trucks--even modified school buses--and enlist volunteers to help him.

In the past few years, Mark has affiliated his efforts with two Christian organizations, JAF Ministries in Agoura Hills and Hope Haven in his hometown of Rock Valley, Iowa. 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 one of the project’s converts after going along on one of the Guatemala trips in 1992. Once home he would call up David, who was now living in Southern California, and tell him: “You’ve got to collect chairs. You’ve got to go to Guatemala with Mark.”

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

At a gathering at a friend’s house in Minneapolis on Thanksgiving, 1994, Denny again nudged David to start collecting chairs. After a full dinner, Denny went to sleep and died. Years of obesity and chronic health problems had taken their toll. He was 44.

At the funeral the following week in Wisconsin, David, other relatives and friends talked about how Denny’s 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-bound people volunteered their time to fix the donated chairs.

“Once you put your hand on a used wheelchair, you’re hooked,” David 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-size. He recalls a 10-year-old girl named Maria who had her arms wrapped around him as he lowered her into her first wheelchair. Another childhood victim of 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’d brought along, so David has concentrated his collecting efforts on those.

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 devote full-time work to the wheelchairs.

“Since Denny died, he sort of lit the fire,” David 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 to David. ‘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 become trash.

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Within the next couple of months, David 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 place in Simi Valley needs it back in April.)

He is confident 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.”

People who have wheelchairs they wish to donate to Wheels for Humanity can bring them this morning before noon to First Christian Church, 4390 Colfax Ave., North Hollywood. For more information, call David Richard at (818) 766-8000.