Wheelchairs Make the World Go Round

This article appeared in the Knights of Columbus Columbia Magazine March 2006 Issue.  For a printable PDF version of this article, please click here.

Ken Behring went as far as he could by cab. Then he got out and hiked through the Vietnamese countryside, pushing the wheelchair he planned to give to a girl he’d never met before. Finally he reached the little house where she lived with her parents.

“This little girl had never been able to walk,” said Behring. “She lay on a pile of rags in the corner. She was about 7 years old and she had never moved on her own.”

That was before she got a wheelchair.

“It took a while, hut we finally showed her how” to use the chair, Behring recalled. “When she finally moved herself, she just broke into the biggest smile there’s ever been.”

This girl was one of the first people to benefit from Behring’s Wheelchair Foundation – and Behring will never forget her, because she showed him that a wheelchair represents more than mobility, more than freedom.

“We’re showing people that somebody cares,” Behring explained. “That they are important.”

THE WHEELCHAIR FOUNDATION

Founded in June 2000, the Wheelchair Foundation buys up to 10,000 wheelchairs a month. They are distributed around the world with the help of distribution partners including the U.S. government, United Nations organizations, and nongovernmental organizations from the Red Cross to Rotary Clubs, and now the Knights
of Columbus. As of early 2006, the Wheelchair Foundation had distributed or committed to distribute nearly 425,000 wheelchairs – but much remains to be done. An estimated 100 to 150 million people around the world are in need of a wheelchair. Fewer than 1 percent own or have access to one.

These are statistics that Behring, former owner of football’s Seattle
Seahawks, discovered after his first wheelchair donation. He had a habit
of carrying relief supplies on his MD-87 jet when he traveled around the world. In 1999, the supplies he took on a trip to Eastern Europe included wheelchairs. When he saw how dramatically – and immediately – a wheelchair could change an individual’s life, the idea for the Wheelchair Foundation was born.

For every donation of $75 the foundation receives, it provides matching funds to purchase a wheel-chair for $150. The chairs are shipped, 280 at a time in massive containers, directly to the destination nation; at last count, chairs have been distributed in 143 countries at no cost to the recipients.

When he started the Wheelchair Foundation, Behring was no newcomer to philanthropy. He established the Seattle Seahawks Charitable Foundation and has donated tens of millions of dollars to numerous causes. But in some ways, the Wheelchair Foundation has been as big a help to him as it has been to the wheelchair recipients themselves.

“I’ve been very successful in my life in business,” explained Behring. “At that point in my life, no longer was there anything I wanted to buy or anyplace to go. I felt there had to be something else.”

Headquartered in Northern California, the Wheelchair Foundation has an international staff of 25 – including two of Behring’s sons – and a board of advisers that includes the king and queen of Spain, Mikhail Gorbachev, Jerry Lewis and Supreme Knight Carl A. Anderson.

A UNIQUE PARTNERSHIP

The California State Council has begun working with the Wheelchair Foundation, even though, as State Deputy Gary Nelson said, it’s “not the most usual thing” for Knights to partner with another organization. But the California Knights are simply following the example of the Supreme Council.

In 2002, Supreme Knight Anderson met a member of the Wheelchair Foundation. By 2003, that meeting had blossomed into a working relationship: the Supreme Council sponsored 2,000 wheel-chairs to be distributed in Afghanistan. In 2004-05, the Supreme Council sponsored 2,000 chairs for distribution in the Middle East, the Philip-pines and Mexico. In 2006, 2,000 more are being distributed in the Philippines, Mexico and Poland.

Also in 2002, the Wheelchair Foundation arranged a meeting with some of the state officers of the California Knights. Don Gentleman, a member of Msgr. Francis X. Singleton Council 10248 in Clovis, attended that meeting. Then a Fourth Degree master and program chair for the state, Gentleman heard about a planned wheelchair distribution in Guatemala. He decided to go along and see for himself what the Wheelchair Foundation is all about.

“Those distributions are so touching. They really yank at your heartstrings,” said Gentleman, now the California State Wheelchair Program chairman.

“One fellow came in. He’d been carrying his wife on his back for 12 years. We put her in a wheelchair, and that man cried like a baby.”

When Gentleman returned to his council and to his work at the state level, he told about his experiences in Guatemala. The California Knights immediately began taking up collections for wheelchairs, but it wasn’t until 2005 that the program began to soar.
The goal for 2005-06 is to donate $96,000 to the Wheelchair Foundation. By early December, about $65,000 had already been raised. In April 2005, a group of California Knights joined Knights of Northern Mexico in a wheelchair distribution in three Mexican cities.

“I am a little amazed at the donations coming in because of the hurricanes and the [Order’s Gulf States Disaster Relief] Katrina fund and all,” Gentleman admitted. “I expected a big, sharp drop, but if anything, we had an increase during that period.”

’MESSENGERS TO THE WORLD’

For Chris Lewis, public education director for the Wheelchair Foundation and son of entertainer Jerry Lewis, the Knights’ partnership is particularly meaningful.

“I’m so tickled, I can’t tell you, about how this has been coming about,” said Lewis, a Knight since 2000. “There are so many like-minded people within the Order who are concerned about improving the quality of people’s lives, and are wondering how they can do it.”

State Deputy Nelson has helped the Knights of California see how they can do it. He asked every KC unit in the state to raise $150 before the end of his term; that means that, with the foundation’s matching funds, each assembly, council, Columbian Squires circle and chapter will fund the purchase of two wheelchairs. Each wheelchair purchased with the help of Knights’ donations bears a Knights of Columbus emblem.

“The thing that benefits us the most is awareness,” said Lewis. “People just don’t believe that you can sponsor the delivery of a brand-new wheelchair for $75. The message that the Knights are carrying to their councils, to their parishes, and outside to the community, is what’s causing so many people to get involved.

“What they have become is our messengers to the world.”

Its not only Knights who are spreading the word about the Wheelchair Foundation. Marilyn Willour, wife of Past State Deputy Ross Willour of St. Columban Council 3926 in Westminster, made a presentation about the foundation at Trinity Episcopal Church in Orange, Calif., where she was the administrator until her recent retirement. “I think people may be tired of me talking about it,” she said with a chuckle, “but I bring up the wheelchairs whenever I can.”

HANDS-ON SPIRITUALITY

A donated wheelchair affects the recipient physically. But the California Knights who went on the distribution trip in Mexico saw very clearly how wheelchairs impact the recipients emotionally and spiritually – and felt how the distribution affected them, too.

Past State Deputy William Przybyla of Redding Council 3978 went to Mexico last year for the foundation’s distribution, and recalls seeing a young man with a spasm condition receive a wheelchair. “To see the father getting tears in his eyes, because now he was going to be able to get his son around – it was very emotional,” said Przybyla. “It didn’t just impact the person receiving the wheelchair; it impacts the family.

“Actually participating in a distribution, you get to see your work come to fruition,” he added. “It really does make you a better person.”

Jim Letcher, Fourth Degree master of the Northern California District, shows a recently produced DVD of the Knights’ wheelchair distribution in Mexico each time he installs new officers for an assembly. “I always get very emotional when I see this movie,” he said. “I talk about how it affects me – how spiritual it is for me to help someone I don’t even know.”

He then passes around a hat so Knights can donate to the Wheelchair Foundation. “By the time the hat comes around, I’ve always had $150 or more,” said Letcher.

The Knights’ partnership with the Wheelchair Foundation may be unusual, but it’s also perfectly fitting, said Nelson, a member of Father Walter O’Brien Council 3518 in San Lorenzo.

“‘In service to One, in service to all.’ This [program] is the ‘all,’” he said.
“It doesn’t matter that they’ve never heard of the Knights of Columbus; what matters is, we can help.”

HOW KNIGHTS CAN HELP

To learn more about the Wheelchair Foundation, go to www.wheelchairfoundation.org. There you can view the video of the California and Mexico Knights participating in the Mexican wheelchair distribution by clicking on “Videos.” To order the DVD from the Supreme Council, contact Columbia magazine at or by e-mail at

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To find out how your council can join the Wheelchair Foundation’s efforts to help people in need of wheelchairs, call or e-mail Chris Lewis at

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Elisabeth Deffner writes from California. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including the Los Angeles Times, the National Catholic Register and Catholic Digest.