Featured Stories

Most people with disabilities are not born with them; 4 out of 5 become disabled after adolescence.

Accessibility to recreation is a big issue for many returning vets

Without warning, a routine day in Iraq suddenly turned into hell for Army Sergeant Rob Wentworth. On June 27, 2007, Wentworth was guarding a police station near Bayji when a suicide bomber drove up to the front- gate and exploded a 2,000-pound car bomb. The attack killed more than 100 Iraqi civilians and police. Wentworth, standing behind a cement wall 100 feet away, was blown 25 feet through a metal garage door. He survived, with back, knee, and ankle injuries, as well as a traumatic brain injury. Still on active duty, Wentworth is back in the States, assigned to the Brain Injury Association of Michigan, where he helps other vets recover from the effects of injuries incurred in the line of duty.

Community foundations open new vistas through accessible recreation projects

Community foundation executive Lynn Borg paints a dramatic scene to inspire team members working on an accessible recreation project in St. Clair, Michigan. The Vice President of the Community Foundation of St. Clair asks her co-workers to envision a school-age girl on a beach outing with friends. Her buddies gambol in the sand and water, as kids their age have done for generations when warm summer days intersect with sun and sand. But the girl uses a wheelchair, and she can only watch, because her access to the beach ends where hard ground meets sand.

Columbia City Splashpad project followed recipe for success

When Sharon Smith, Program Officer for the Dekko Foundation, sits down with a potential grant applicant, one of the first things she does is provide a pie. Don’t start to salivate – apple and cherry aren’t on the menu. Instead, Smith’s pie is a simple circle sketched out to represent the applicant’s project. It’s perhaps one of the easiest visual ways to explain that responsible funders, such as the Dekko Foundation, aren’t likely to fund the whole enchilada (or pie). Smith dissects the circle into healthy servings in an effort to illustrate that projects demonstrating collaboration and broad-based community support are much more likely to be favorably viewed by the private foundation in northeast Indiana.

Michigan DNR reaches out to people with disabilities

It’s Accessibility Hands-On Day at the Department of Natural Resources’ Island Lake Shooting Range near Brighton. A crowd gathers behind archer Rod Oglesby as he draws a modified compound bow, aims, and releases the bowstring. Appreciative murmurs pass through the crowd as the arrow finds its target, more than 70 yards away. It was a great shot, by any standard. It was all the more remarkable given the fact that Oglesby has only the use of his left arm. He aimed the bow with his good arm, and released the string by sipping a straw-like device he devised himself because, as he told the crowd, the modified bows on the commercial market didn’t work for him. “You don’t know what I need until you’ve experienced what it is,” he tells the crowd.

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