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Despite gray clouds overhead, volunteers for Joni and Friends in Knoxville, Tennessee, gladly waited on Monday, Sept. 30, outside the commercial building where donated wheelchairs, walkers and crutches had been stored.
“We have been collecting this load for about two years,” said Lauren Richardson, the ministry’s area director. She motioned for the truck driver to park in front of where the donated items were already being staged. “Hopefully, everything will fit in this 53-foot semi-trailer,” she said.
A group of young men from University of Tennessee’s Sigma Chi Fraternity lifted equipment into the truck and carefully arranged the load that would soon be heading to the South Central Correctional Facility in Clifton, Tenn.
Since 1979, Joni and Friends, the organization started by Joni Eareckson Tada after a diving accident left her a quadriplegic, has advocated for those living with disabilities and their families. Part of its thriving global ministry includes the Wheels for the World program that has donated over 235,000 wheelchairs, restored to like-new condition, and given to those in need in less resourced countries.
Donated wheelchairs and mobility equipment are dropped off at offices or through collection events and stored until they can be shipped to one of the program’s restoration centers located in prisons within the United States. Once there, inmates who have applied to work in the program begin to clean and restore the equipment. When a wheelchair project is complete, inmates sign their name on a “Given in love by Joni and Friends” sticker they place on the wheelchair.
“I visited the prison in Clifton, Tennessee, where we send the donated chairs and saw the whole process,” Richardson told the team of volunteers, who ranged from college students to senior citizens. “I had the opportunity to talk with one of the inmates who was part of the program. He told me, ‘It was a wheelchair that got me into prison, and now it’s a wheelchair that’s giving me hope.’”
Richardson recounted the conversation, sharing that a fall from a ladder caused severe injuries, leaving the inmate in a wheelchair during his long recovery.
“Because of the pain and everything he was going through, he spiraled into depression, which led to drinking and then to drug use,” said Richardson. “In order to support his newly formed habit, he started selling drugs, which landed him in the medium security prison.”
Keeping good communication running between the ministries is a vital element in the program’s success.