Podcast Transcription
[TYLER DICKERHOOF]
Welcome back to the Impact Driven Leader podcast. This is your host Tyler Dickerhoof. If you're watching on YouTube, good to see ya. If you're listening on, let's see, Apple, iTunes, Spotify, or the other 500 or 600 different places to listen to podcasts, glad you're here. Super excited to be with you. Excited to have the conversation today with two individuals, Don Schoendorfer and Nuka Solomon. Don is the founder of an organization called Free Wheelchair Mission. Nuka is the CEO, has been with the organization just over five years. Don started the organization back in the early two thousands, late nineties so when it really started to take on to date. Hear this amazing stat, they have given away 1.3 million wheelchairs to people around the world that were otherwise incapable of moving. It's a pretty amazing story.
I'm thankful that the book Miracle Wheels, that if you're watching on YouTube, you can see a copy of it there, it's a pretty rudimentary, it's just a really, it's one of those plastic lawn chairs, those plastic white resin lawn chairs with some wheels strapped to it. A little bit of frame. That's how rudimentary and simple, the solution of providing mobility to people around the world was. I'm thankful for this platform, this opportunity to be able to share amazing stories from people like Don, who took a really kind of this seed that was planted in him many, many years before, and through some difficult circumstances in life, said, how can I make a difference and listening to that nudge, that call. Again I hope you get value from today's episode. I hope if nothing else, you get to see how the investment of a hundred dollars can literally change someone's life, absolutely, change someone's life.
I'm excited to be able to share this with you. Excited to be able to share the story of how a biomedical engineer took his gifts and his talents and abilities to be able to make this organization now that over 20 years has altered a million plus lives of just people with wheelchair, but all their families and everyone else. Again, thanks for being here. If you get value from today's episode, make sure you go check out freewheelchairmission.org, miraclewheels.org, find out more about their organization. Again, I am thankful for the opportunity to be able to share a little bit and hopefully get value. I know you're going to get some value from today's conversation. So get ready and enjoy this conversation with Don Schoendorfer and Nuka Solomon.
Don and Nuka, thank you so much for joining me on the Impact Driven Leader podcast. I'm excited to talk with you guys. As I was preparing for this as I was reading through your book, Miracle Wheels, Don I really was intrigued by this whole idea of the Free wheelchair Mission, so I'm going to let you clue in the audience where that started, the early start of that and then we'll get rolling into just taking that apart and really sharing the message of what you guys are on mission to do.
[DON SCHOENDORFER]
Well, I didn't have any particular personal experience with anybody in a wheelchair needing a wheelchair. But I was on vacation in Morocco in 1979, I think, with my wife. We weren't there more than a few hours in a small village near the crossing from Alder, and we're in the old part they call the Medina and then that Medina dirt road, and there were actually burrows or donkeys pulling wagons made out of wood and wooden wheels and all this stuff. It's just the way they live. They've been doing that for a thousand years. In between the legs of the people walking by was this woman crawling on the ground. I didn't even look, I didn't think, I didn't know who, what she was, I didn't even know she was a woman, but I see these harms going out and the fingernails digging into the dirt and her legs are being dragged behind her, and she's dirty, her torn, her clothes are torn and she's bleeding, and then she's just looking at the ground wearing, she's putting her hands and hoping that nobody would step on her.
[TYLER]
She crossed the road right in front of us and disappeared down an alley and we are just wow, what is this? What's going on here? This is our first impression of Morocco, but it really wasn't a typical situation for Morocco. Like Americans, we wanted to solve the problem right there. So we're looking around and in this old part of the city, there was no wheelchairs. There is no drugstore or any place for you to get buy a wheelchair, which was our, we got to get her off the ground. So we turned our backs and walked away and every now and then something would remind me of that trip at that scene.
But we were just coming back starting our careers and looking for, and starting a family and all that. So 20 years went by and then having teenage daughters and one of them had an eating disorder and this was the first problem I couldn't solve. I had a good education, I knew theory, I knew all that, and there were no equations I could use for this. It literally brought us to our needs. We had to surrender. We got back in the church and this took years, a couple, three years and then I, it was almost like I tried doing something for the church. Rather than just going Sunday, I tried volunteering and I wasn't making any headway at all. I'm not that kind of, I wasn't trained. I'm an introvert. I don't like to engage with strangers. That's just the way I am, the way I'm wired. It's almost like I heard a voice. In fact, I think I did maybe from God saying, Don, why don't you use the talents I gave you to do something for the kingdom?
That's pretty moving. You think about it in those like, I mentioned this in the intro, you heard the intro that you were a biomedical engineer. So it's like, all right, here's this challenge. I know you're trying to really be a dad, and yet this challenge comes before you and say, hey, why don't you use these talents? So how did that come together, how did the wheelchair situation come back into your life at that point?
[DON]
Well, the vision that I told you about, I would be thinking, well, yes, that's one. What does she need? She needed a wheelchair. I mean, the name has the ingredients. It's not that complicated. So I went to Toys "R" Us and I went to Home Depot and then right next to each other, and I got some bikes from Toys "R" Us and some of those white resin lawn chairs from Home Depot and I figured those tires being made on bicycles made in China were probably not very much, probably three or $4 each in China and a chair was four. So I'm up to $10, two chairs and a, one chair and two wheels. I just started to tinker. Then meanwhile the internet was just coming out as a, it was useful search engine, it was now Netscape was the search engine I used back then, and I could actually find out what's going on in the world for wheelchairs, for people in developing countries. One thing led to another, but I found that people were trying to estimate how many there were and the estimates were between 20 million and 130 million.
[TYLER]
Pretty big range.
[DON]
I tried to, yes, and that was disturbing, but even if it was 20 million, it was disturbing, but 130 million? So I just picked a hundred that just to make a round number and then I started asking, well, what are you doing about it? Because there were groups and you could find their websites and yes, I could talk to them. They all wanted to help because the problems, it was huge. I saw how they were doing it and being an engineer, I looked at it from a different perspective, but the I added up all that each one of them had given away since they started and some of them were in business for 20 years, and they totaled, world provided, these groups provided wheelchairs for the whole world, a hundred thousand wheelchairs for let's say a hundred million people.
[TYLER]
They worked hard at these. They are putting their heart and soul. Some of them are religious groups, Christian groups, some of them are humanitarian groups, some of them were government groups, but wow, that's great but it's not great. Because there's so many people in need and then that's the one the engineer gear started. You need something inexpensive, durable, functional, and simple. The thing in Toys "R" Us and Home Depot, you can't get much more simple than that. So I found a way to make a prototype and people didn't really, from our perspective in the west here and developed United States, it didn't look like a wheelchair to them. It looked like a lawn chair with a couple tires on the back. But I know that woman in Morocco, she would've really loved to have been off the ground and she had strength in her arms because she was dragging herself so she could probably use the wheels.
[TYLER]
Yes. How much from, again, this is your engineering brain, you found this simple solution and there's a piece of me, and you mentioned this in your story when you're talking about being in Morocco as Americans, we just want to go and fix it. We just, oh, there's got to be a solution for it. I can imagine Nuka, you shared that you're from Haiti, and I read and I picked up that one of your drivers being involved in this organization is to be able to help in countries where you can see this massive change and really impact different groups and organizations. How often do, again, we as leaders, as business owners, as humanitarians, make it more complicated than what it needs to be? I'll let either one of you go with that one.
[NUKA SOLOMON]
Oh, I think we make it a lot more complicated. We do need to listen to our teams but there is something to be said to listen to your gut and sometimes in some cases, for those of us that are religious, our God. But there is a nice balance between the two. I think Don recognized the problem and he did something about the problem by creating an organization that would solve the problem in a way that no one had really done it before. But the longevity of the organization, 21 plus years later and the amount of wheelchairs we've been able to give out and giving out 1.3 million and the breadth of the partnerships and the relationships is based upon a little bit more process, a little bit more structure and listening. So I think there's a balance, but it starts, a lot of the best problems, the best companies, the best leaders start with a bold solution, an innovative solution. Then they sustain those things with wise council and structure.
[TYLER]
What's funny is, as you share that, and there's a little bit of, you could, I would say you look a little bit like him, but it's a little different, Phil Knight, Nike. That was Phil in a way. It was very innovative. It was very different. He created all new running shoes in a world that had always had the same running shoes. He used a waffle iron to make the original tread for the Nike running shoes. As I was thinking about that, as you're sharing Nuka, it really sometimes is being willing to be that innovatively simple but then stick to it for a long time. You guys have as an organization have done that because you started back early two thousands. Here we are, 20 some years later, over 1.3 million wheelchairs, which I think is so cool. It's made a dent in that number that you shared earlier, Don. But share with us, bridge some of that gap in some of that story in the lessons that you learned through that process Don or Nuka, those lessons that really said, okay, where do we pick up steam or where's this really making a difference in an impact?
[NUKA]
Don, do you want to take that?
[DON]
Well, I could start off on that. Yes, I could start off on that one. Well, I think one of my favorite lines was I wasn't burdened with a lot of experience because like I said, people wouldn't, didn't accept this idea, this picture, this, I had a prototype and I had samples of this wheelchair. Because they were looking at it through the eyes of Western medicine where everything is, we have the resources to make very expensive, elaborate wheelchairs for very needs of people who in the developing world wouldn't live. Because they would never see the opportunity to need that chair because they wouldn't be able to keep alive. Their family wouldn't be able to keep them alive.
So I was just thinking, man, if I was that lady in Morocco, it's, let's just keep it simple. All she needed a simple chair with wheels on it. Fortunately, I have to say God probably put in front of me people who got this because I couldn't stand up to the, I couldn't answer the criticism in a logical way. It doesn't have this, it doesn't have that. Who's going to make it? What are you going to, how are you going to get the money? Who's going to deliver it, all these questions. I wanted to just write a paper. I wanted to, engineers are good at this. I wanted to do a little clinical trial and I made a hundred of them and I was going to get them out and come back a year later and turn and see if the wheels are still spinning on them. I'd write a paper and then it'd be somebody else's job because that was, this was, I figured that was what I had to do. So in a world, didn't have to engineer it.
[DON]
I didn't have to do anything more than just show that this would work, inexpensive, durable, functional wheelchair had had utility. But then I got a chance not to take a hundred of them, which is what I made, and not take 50 or 30. I could only take four to India. It was a medical mission that I found out about through my church, Mariner's Church here in orange County. I've met so much opposition with my peers, the US doctors and nurses, and with the Indian peer, US doctors, I mean Indian trained doctors and nurses because I wasn't going to be any help for them. I wasn't going to be able to practice medicine. I was going, I wasn't going to be able to prescribe anything. I wanted to bring these wheelchairs and see if they'd work and don't.
They really, they told me that we were just hoping you'd go away because we couldn't talk you out of it. The first wheelchair we gave away, it was just a remarkable story. It's a long story and I can tell it, but it takes a while. But it was just, I couldn't speak with these people. Their dialect was Tamil in Chenai India and they're carrying an 11-year-old boy who had cerebral palsy. I didn't know what that was either. It was a disease that was caused because he was delivered in the village at home, not at a doctor, not at a hospital and there was an interruption in the blood flow to the brain and it affected the motor skills. It's a very common problem even in this country delivering, even having babies in the United States in hospitals it's a problem.
But they just, beyond my expectations, they just saw the wheelchair put their son in the wheelchair, started to wheel it around and I didn't say, I couldn't say a word with him, could go to them because I couldn't speak their language and I just smiled. My peers were like out of the corner noticed what I was doing in the parking lot. It was like, what's going on here? How is the wife? Is this working? Then we wound up bringing him to his village, they carried their son three miles to see this card table clinic that was set up in, and these were the first doctor, first medical attention they ever had in their lives. They got up enough nerves to come to this clinic, which can, that's a bold thing to do if you don't know what's happening.
We got to the village and there were people in the village, that was a Sunday, they weren't working. They both worked in, the man and woman, everybody worked in the rice field, the rice paddies. And if they both worked, they'd actually be able to make some money but one of them always had to stay home. So they took turns staying with their son. The whole village gathers around because there's this big van, there's all these white folks hanging out and my peers were a little bit paranoid because they didn't feel comfortable in this Hindu village. All of a sudden, our guide, Moses was his name, he said, "Don, we have to leave." I said, "What, we have to leave? This is great. I'm seeing, I'm taking all this in. I'm trying to get some data here for my paper." He said, "Well, I didn't have the, I didn't think about checking out whether we could go, come into this village. I didn't stop at the elders home. I didn't get his permission. He's like the constable, he's the mayor. He's everybody. He's probably voted and he just arrived. He's angry because I embarrassed him. We embarrassed him by just barging in there like this."
"So okay, I get it. I get it. Moses, we better get out here. But I did my job. Time for you to do yours." He said, "What do you mean my job, your job?" He said, "Well, I'm the engineer. I brought the wheelchair. Your name, Moses, I know you've got a Bible in your pocket. Would you read, tell him something about why we're here." The villagers listened to him, would create enthusiasm because they thought what he was reading was going to explain why this son was getting this wheelchair, this boy. I don't know what he read, but they were, he later told me usually people just walk away when he starts reading from our holy book to another religion. But they were spellbound by the situation and when we left and we turned around and there's the mob running after the bus and she's got two glasses of water. She needed to give us something. She finally realized when we were leaving that the wheelchair was something they could have and this is the only thing she could afford to give away.
[TYLER]
Wow. The layer there that I think is so applicable in our world today, if we're willing to just give, if we're willing to do something to benefit and serve others, how much it breaks down all those barriers that we seem to have, whether it's race, talk about being white in this Indian community where you look totally different. You're different religions, different values, whatever. But just the idea to say, hey, I'm here to serve you, I have a gift that you could engineer it, that you were able to construct even crudely or whatever, these chairs that I did, so to benefit someone else's life. I think really as a man, if we were to think more about that as a society today, how many walls would be broken down? I would imagine you guys have seen that a lot in the 1.3 million chairs that have been given away and donated and into hands that really can utilize them.
[DON]
Nuka was just down in Brazil and Argentina. Fresh stories that she has to share.
[NUKA]
I mean, I think the biggest thing is what you said about breaking down barriers. When we went to, when I went to Brazil last month, we were giving out wheelchairs in the indigenous villages there. It's similar construct to the United States where it's a completely segregated society within a larger society. With our Native Americans here, we understand what that looks like. Okay. Giving out wheelchairs to populations like that even their own governments haven't been able to reach is very complex. There's a lot of bureaucracy that goes into getting the permissions. There's a lot of understanding that has to come into play with old problems and issues tribal in nature, pardon the pun.
But the wheelchair tends to be the great equalizer I found in societies like that. Because ultimately what we're trying to show is that everybody's worthy of having that relief, renew dignity and getting that opportunity. When you're giving them an object that is significant in value and it's brand new like our wheelchairs are, it's not refurbished and you're coming from far away to hand this to them you're showing them that you care and that you love them. That's how the start of free wheelchair mission all began. It's about somebody like Don seeing a problem, as you asked at the beginning, taking ownership and doing something about it, that's bold, and then putting together people like our team to help him to make it be done on a multiplying exponential way such that we can now 21 years later still reach communities we've never touched or seen before and cut through the bureaucracy and give these people something that they need. Many of them have been waiting for decades or their whole lifetime for that thing. There's just something so rewarding about that that you can't really even describe unless you do it.
[TYLER]
There was a line that you that was written in your book, Don, again, the book Miracle Wheels. You commented about, there was a time in my life where I wanted to be a billionaire, but the real treasure I came to discover was far more valuable than that. It was people. I think that that last piece that you were sharing, Nuka, the ability to give dignity to someone that's really showing them the value they have. Man, we can do that any place in our life. When we do that, man, it's amazing how people respond. I mean, you talk about the woman who gave you water. That's all she had. That reminds me of the biblical story about the lady in her two pennies or two measly sense because that's wall she had. I think it's amazing, again, when you see that lived out, whether this is in politics and religious and race or whatever tensions you may have. When you see those little things lived out, man, how it all seems to disappear, it all seems to get washed away. It's like, nope. There's a real purpose here. There's something really important at hand.
[NUKA]
Absolutely. People, a lot of times when they go to these countries don't realize, we show up with the wheelchair and we assume that we're saving them. A lot of times they're giving something back to us in return too and understanding that you can feel like you're the most difficult and hopeless situation, but somehow or another, by the grace of God and resiliency, you still continue to carry on. It's something for those of us who are able to walk who have our mobility that we lose sight of. So we, I know Don has totally talked about it many times, it's not just about them giving us tangible gifts like water or an ear of corn from their fields, but it's the indescribable understanding that hope and faith really stand the test of time when you hit adversity.
[TYLER]
Yes. Great. There's a piece there that I think you, it sometimes takes those experiences and like you both have gone and experienced those and maybe many listeners have as well, that it puts all your current, whatever challenges you have in perspective. I know Don, you share in your book, you shared about your daughter earlier, you share about your wife Lori. One of the elements that I really picked up, and I believe this is for myself as I've seen it it's the tough experiences, the rock-bottom experiences. You talked about when you went to India the first time in the book, how you came home and your company no longer existed, it was bankrupt, it was gone, like, I don't have a job. It's those moments that propel us into something amazing. So I'd love for you to just share a little bit more with the audience, how those moved you even more to what you're doing today and created amazing experiences, but also a greater passion for what you're doing and what the Free Wheelchair Mission is about.
[DON]
Yes, there were things that are happening that were easy and I didn't think, like most of my career everything was very difficult and you had to work really hard and you had to have plan B and plan C and all this other stuff. But the things about wheelchairs, just getting a supplier, getting a manufacturer, getting supplies, figuring out how to do shipping, people would come to me and would just tell me, and, well, that's a coincidence. Oh, there's another coincidence. There's a whole bunch of coincidences here. Because this first trip was done through a church and it was, so the people that came with me were so impressed, they talked, they told people about what had happened.
You see somebody's on the ground and all of a sudden they're sitting in a chair and they look like a different person and they're alive. They're sparkling. So I would get a lot of counseling from them, from people in the church and other people who've knew what had happened. My first question for them is, how do I find another job ? I've got 25 years into biomedical engineering and a handsome degree, and I don't want to, this is what I'm here for. I'm here to do this and they said, no, no, no, you're not. No, you're not. Don't you understand those coincidences? They are not coincidences. God is moving you in this direction.
I said, no, no, no. God created, he's got so many things to worry about in this vast universe that there's no way he could be thinking about me. He said, wait a minute. Didn't You tell me that you believe he has infinite power? I said, yes. Well, you're an engineer. You must know what infinite means. It extends to everything. Really, you think he's actually behind this project? Wow. I mean, it took over for me a while to, I was humiliated. Also like, now that can't be, but I've gradually, that's what people convinced me of. I said, okay I will have it your way. God. Not like, I didn't really have too much, too many cards on the table to deal with him, and I'll follow your lead and you can lead this. So that was a huge transition. I mean, very huge transition. And suddenly all the other things, the billion dollars, that would've been a disaster. I never would've taken the time to do any of this stuff. It was a reckoning. To this day, it's just, and the people that worked for Free Wheelchair Mission, I mean, Nuka is here because she believes God has put her here.
[TYLER]
So why don't you talk a little bit about that Nuka, is why now you had a pretty, from what I gathered, an elaborate career working in nonprofits, working some pretty amazing organizations, not to take anything away from Free Wheelchair Mission, because I think it's doing amazing things. But what really drove you to say, wow, I can really make an impact here, I can really use my gifts to do something amazing here?
[NUKA]
I mean, at the time I really wasn't looking to work at an organization that gave out a bunch of wheelchairs. To be honest. I knew nothing about wheelchairs directly, but I did know a lot about poverty. I did know a lot about the global need given, as we talked about earlier my heritage and I was happy where I was. But through a recruiter and many long stories after that I came to Free Wheelchair Mission because I felt called by God to do so. I came to the interview initially really not thinking I would want the job, but after hearing Don's story and really hearing the vast impact that the organization had made, and selfishly I will say the fact that they had done a lot in Haiti I couldn't pass it up.
One of my first distributions was in Haiti and seeing the first wheelchair going to a boy that had waited for eight years was life changing. Then getting that confirmation from family that continued to live on the island, which is still plagued with a lot of civil unrest and devastation, that when they see our blue wheelchairs, they see results, when they see our blue wheelchairs, that they feel a sense of pride also was definitely a huge, and is still a motivation for me to continue this work. Because as I said earlier, there's a savior complex that we can sometimes have, like any doctor who's saving a patient. We humanitarians sometimes have that savior complex, right but when you hear firsthand from people in developing countries that you are making a difference there is no greater affirmation, it doesn't matter what's in your head. You hear it directly from the source and through God, you then know that you're doing the right thing. So my motivation is the work that we're doing and the need that continues to exist. There's 75 million people that need a wheelchair and some of them have been waiting all their lives and we're making a big impact, but we have to keep going.
[TYLER]
Well, you guys, both of you, thank you, Don, thank you Nuka. What again, it's a privilege for me to be able to share this story. Obviously, everyone listening in can get the book Miracle Wheels and follow Free Wheelchair Mission through whether through social media, whatever else. Again, excited to be able to just share and grateful to learn about it. It's an organization I didn't know about and such a cool organization that again, just something pretty simple that's making a major impact and to me that's really cool.
[NUKA]
Thank you so much, Tyler.
[DON]
There's one thing, one important thing you we left out that, so I mentioned when we first met that there's two secrets. There's two things that we have to convince people that there's, it's 75 million, that's what the World Health Organization says, people in the world around the world that don't have a wheelchair, that need one. Then we have a solution that's $96. So we can make a chair, we can we can have it shipped, we can have it taken, gone to one of, we've been in 94 countries, but we're working now in 34 countries heavily. They'll take the chair, they'll store it, they'll assemble it, they'll adjust it, and they'll give it to a person all for free. We insist absolutely no discrimination. Whoever needs a chair, we don't care what religion they have, age, sex, what politics they have, they get a chair if they need a chair, period, no questions asked. Here's the chair. We do that for $96.
[TYLER]
That's awesome. It's awesome. I think what is cool about that is it's pretty doable. Yes, there's a big mountain, there's a lot of people, but for $100 a chair you can make a major impact in someone's life
[DON]
That's what we're here for.
[TYLER]
Yes. Well, again, thank you guys. Appreciate you being here. Thank you for sharing your story.
[NUKA]
Thank you, Tyler.
[TYLER]
I know today's episode a little different. It's not with a typical author, not with a typical leader, but both Don and Nuka shared some amazing wisdom and value. If anything, I can hopefully leave you with, hopefully something that I took from this conversation was when we were talking about the idea of, it's something pretty simple that can bring people together. Something so simple as a wheelchair that can wash away different political, racial belief barriers. Man, if we can look for those places in our life with those that we lead work with, man, how much better would our life be? At the same point, everyone is worthy. That was one of the things that Nuka shared that I wrote down, that I believe wholeheartedly.
I think when we start to go about life in that way, a lot of those barriers that are built up in our world start to really erode. They start to break down. I really hope you got value from today's episode. I hope you go check out more about their organization. If it's somewhere where you're thinking about giving, maybe it's something for you, it's not necessarily a pitch for them, but I think it's really cool and a neat organization that's impacting lives. When this was first brought to me, the book was brought to me, I thought about my friend Joe Degra. Joe, who is a previous guest, he is the coats for the US wheelchair rugby team. He's shared in a story with me how much of a difference a good wheelchair makes, how much of a difference that just the ability to have a wheelchair. Well, it's allowed him to continue to compete, to be an athlete and impact lives.
That's back of my mind the whole time of Chris Norton, another one of my previous guests who was in the documentary Seven Yards, who ended up willing himself to being able to walk after being paralyzed. I think about them and I think about the impact that I know chairs have made in their lives, plus thousands and millions of other people. That's why I thought I really want to have an interview and a conversation with Don and Nuka and I'm glad I did. I hope you got value. I hope it was worth your time and I really hope you will just share their mission because maybe it's going to hit somebody right in the heart. If I had a peace and part in that man, I'm thankful. I'm thankful for the opportunity. Again, I'm glad you listened in today. I'm glad you are here watching if you're on YouTube. Until next time, have a good one.
