The Gift of Mobility

Rosaleen Doherty, Owner of Right at Home Haverhill, is participating in My Giving Story. The My Giving Story is a submission into a non-profit contest put out by The Gates Foundation. The contest looks for inspiring stories on what drives people to give back in their community. Every act of giving has a story, a meaning and a drive behind it. The purpose behind My Giving Story is to inspire others to give back by sharing their inspirational stories. Top story winners receive $10,000.00 for their favorite non-profit organization!

Here is Rosaleen’s story:

In April 2017, I was introduced to the people of Free Wheelchair Mission at a corporate event I was attending with my work team from Boston. Free Wheelchair Mission is a non-profit humanitarian organization, started by an engineer who figured out how to make a durable wheelchair for just $80.00. He desired to get a wheelchair to any person around the world that needed one. Since 2001, Free Wheelchair Mission has distributed over 1 million wheelchairs worldwide. Free Wheelchair Mission believes in a world where everyone who needs a wheelchair has one. Their goal is to provide their next million wheelchairs by 2025. With an estimated 70 million people around the world today in need of a wheelchair without the means to get one, Free Wheelchair Mission endeavors to distribute over 100,000 wheelchairs annually and continues to pursue the goal to distribute the second million wheelchairs by the end of 2025. Free Wheelchair Mission continues its focus and commitment on becoming a leading provider of mobility in developing nations, but beyond placing recipients in a wheelchair, Free Wheelchair Mission is bringing transformation that opens doors to education, employment opportunities and community that these individuals only dreamed of before receiving the gift of mobility.

As a Rotarian who has worked in our worldwide effort to End Polio Now, to come across an effort to help those who are denied mobility was a game changer. This past month, I went with a team to Costa Rica on a Vision Trip with Free Wheelchair Mission to assemble and deliver wheelchairs to recipients in the countryside preselected by the Do It Foundation. We delivered wheelchairs to people from the age of 5 to 96. Having a wheelchair has unburdened their families from physically moving their loved one and given the recipient the independence to move themselves. Recipients said they could now go to church, go up the street to see a loved one or friend, start working again and the children could go to school. I got to meet Thomasa.

She is 58 years old and contracted polio at just 8 months old. She has never walked and her mother, on the left, has been her lifetime caretaker. Thomasa sells embroidery work at their local church. This chair will help her mother move her over the dirt roads of their town and in and out of the shower. I am over 50 years of age and received a polio vaccine. Thomasa never got one. The circumstances of my birth and my access to a polio vaccine is the difference in our life paths. I have worked with many non-profits. Free Wheelchair Mission creates a life changing event for individuals and families for less money than we pay in a monthly cellphone or cable bill. My Vision Trip showed me how the gift of one wheelchair is like giving someone the world. Since the Gates Foundation has given so much to eradicate a disease that damages mobility, this would be an opportunity to help those that missed the opportunity or had another misfortune.

Voting for Rosaleen’s story ended on December 7, 2017.