At a stop in Haiphong during a recent mission to deliver wheelchairs to Vietnam, Kenneth Behring was introduced to a young, sullen girl who hadn’t been able to move her legs since birth. Tempting her with a lollipop, the 72-year-old former owner of the Seattle Seahawks lifted the youngster off a pile of rags that had served as her bed and gently placed her into a wheelchair. Within minutes, the child was wheeling herself around the room, smiling from ear-to-ear. It was one of the most moving experiences of Behring’s life.
“I’ve been very fortunate and that’s why I’m giving away wheelchairs,” Behring says. “It’s time I try to give something back and make it a little better world in payment for the good life I’ve had.” This past June, Behring launched Wheelchair Foundation, a new foundation that aims to purchase and deliver one million wheelchairs internationally over the next five years.
Underwritten with a $15 million contribution from Behring, the foundation intends to raise an additional $150 million from corporations, other foundations and individuals. Donors who give $150. to the cause will be linked with a specific wheelchair and will receive a photo of the chair and its recipient.
For Behring, who began his business selling cars, and subsequently made a fortune in home construction, this project is just one of many ways he’s used his wealth to fund worthy causes. (In late September, he announced his donation of $80 million to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC.)
The idea for giving wheelchairs came to him after several trips in recent years to deliver medical and educational supplies to communities in Tanzania and Namibia
Wherever Behring traveled, he asked staff in rehabilitation hospitals what they most needed. The answer he heard again and again: “wheelchairs.”
“If you talk to government agencies, they say they furnish all the wheelchairs that are needed, but that’s not true at all,” Behring says. Instead, when he’d visit hospitals he would “see people shoved into corners and covered up with blankets.”
In addition to 250 heavy-duty wheelchairs Behring helped bring to Vietnam last March, he participated in deliveries to Romania, Botswana and Guatemala. To date 600 wheelchairs have been distributed in eight countries. The organization’s goal is to deliver 30,000 wheelchairs to 58 countries by the end of the year.
For Behring, there’s no substitute for seeing first-hand what it’s like to touch a person’s life with so simple a gift. “Being there makes all the difference it the world,” Behring says. “You have to see the people and hold their hands and help lift them into the wheelchairs to realize they are poor, but they have feelings and are just like us except that they have no hope. If you can give them hope and a way of life, it really makes you feel good.”
In starting the Wheelchair Foundation, Behring returned to something he knows well: providing people transportation and being an entrepreneur.
As a young man, Behring bought 27 used cars for $900 and started the first dealership of its kind in his hometown of Monroe, Wisconsin. A few years and one Lincoln-Mercury dealership later, Behring and his family left Monroe for Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “I liked the challenge of starting something new,” says Behring. “ I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I’d had my fill of selling cars.”
As a sideline to car sales in Monroe, Behring started, on a modest scale, building houses and apartments. His business grew and by the late 1960s his company had become the largest builder of single-family homes in Florida. In 1972, he moved to Northern California where he developed the 2,300 home country club community of Blackhawk.
Behring bought the Seattle Seahawks football franchise in 1988, and also set up the Seattle Seahawks Charitable Foundation to assist children’s charities in the Seattle area. His first taste of giving turned him overnight into a philanthropist.
“Many of us have made enough so that we don’t need more money,” Behring says. “You’re looking for some other way to fulfill your life, to show the reason you’re here is more than just to make money.”
Over the next few years Behring, who lives in Danville, California, built the Museum of Art, Science, and Culture in Berkeley (in partnership with the University of California) to house the school’s paleontology, anthropology, art and science collections. He pledged $20 million to the Smithsonian and contributed $2.1 million to expand the Safari Club International Wildlife Museum. In late September of this year, Behring committed to the largest single donation ever in the history of Washington, D.C.’s Smithsonian Institution he pledged $80 million to its National Museum of American History.
While he’s proud of all he’s done over the years, Behring says it’s hard to beat the satisfaction he gets from his current undertaking. “When I see the happiness in the faces of the people who get a wheelchair, I feel that this is the best thing I have ever done in my life.”
