Title:Wheelchair Nonprofit
Delivers Hope After Devastation
Written by Jon Landon
Hashtags: bebrave,
disability, lifetransition
Topic: REV Originals
“We always said we were never going to leave anyone behind, and until now, we’ve kept true to our word and no one has ever left with their hands empty.”
These words, by one time President of Living Hope Wheelchair Association, Noe’ Ramirez, reflect the credo of the organization: For more than 15 years it has committed its energy and talents to improve members’ access to needed medical and human services, promote the inclusion of people with disabilities, foster independence, enhance mobility, and demand equality for those with spinal cord injuries. They have been able to develop a community of hope, confidence, and aspiration to overcome the feelings of isolation, depression, and the many devastating barriers to their participation in society. The organization empowers each person’s sense of agency, immediately granting a sense of belonging while also providing roles for each person’s unique gifts and capacities. There is no room for self-pity here; rather than acting as a temporary buttress for survival, Living Hope conceives of itself as a vehicle for permanent change.
How the Organization Began
In December 1997, Noe’ Ramirez, crossed the Mexican American border by clinging to the undercarriage of a rail car as it perilously raced for hundreds of miles northward. His plan was to work for a year in America to save money for a new taxi to support his wife and daughter back home in Mexico. He landed a job working at a restaurant in downtown Houston. Merely ten months later while riding his bike to work early one morning, he was struck by a hit and run driver, ending up with his chest and spine crushed, and quadriplegic for life.
Doctors sent Ramirez to the Quentin Mease Community Hospital, part of the Harris County Hospital District in the Houston metropolitan area, which didn’t ask for proof of citizenship at the time. There he met other patients with spinal cord injuries who were also undocumented, and they created an informal support group to help each other through their life-changing traumas. However, in the year 2005, Harris County Hospital District decided to stop providing necessary medical supplies to people with spinal cord injuries that were non-Medicaid eligible.
In need of medical supplies that cost as much
as $400 out of pocket each month, the group officially formed, moving to the
Metropolitan Multi-Service Center, a recreation center run by the Houston Parks
and Recreation Department for people with disabilities. They commenced
fundraising for the association’s needs by selling roses on street corners and
at intersections. They had carwashes., They sold homemade food and held raffles
at local churches where they raised money from TVs, microwaves, and other
household appliances that their friends and supporters had donated. This money
was then used to purchase medical supplies in bulk, such as catheters, diapers,
and rubber gloves, which they apportioned among themselves every month.
Noe Ramirez guided the association through these early days as its president. Having stepped down, he is currently a member of the “Quality of Life Promoter” committee. Having often considered suicide in the early days of his condition, he now visits hospitals and homes every week to meet with people in the early days of their crisis to try to talk them through their trauma, to advise them on practicalities, and on their rights. “People are very thankful about what we are doing,” Ramirez said, “because they feel we care about them”. The work of Living Hope goes beyond just material assistance. The association, from its leadership to its new members, provides each member with invaluable friendship, loyalty, encouragement, and strength. “The work is everyone because if it wasn’t for them, we are nothing, you know? The work is all of us”.
Humble Results in the Early Going
At first, they were only able to supply enough catheters to provide a small fraction of the 180 or so that each member needed every month, but for the past seven years, they have been able to distribute sufficient supplies and medical equipment to meet all 30 plus members monthly needs. Now, on distribution day, the second Wednesday of each month, the organization’s warehouse teams, from floor to ceiling, with medical supplies. Volunteers, many in wheelchairs, collate materials for each member as they scoot around the floor, handing out knuckle-bumps to each other while they maneuver around the warehouse, taking from the shelves the supplies that make a crucial difference in their lives. In 2018, Living Hope distributed almost $110,000 in medical supplies and $28,000 in medical equipment. Today, the association’s program consists not only of monthly distribution of supplies, but wheelchair repair and maintenance, and the distribution of new wheelchairs, scooters, and hospital beds as well as other needed medical equipment.
At its core, Living Hope is a mutual aid society, dispensing equipment and supplies, while providing emotional support to those with spinal cord injuries and other disabilities.
Living Hope, which is almost entirely run by those who themselves have been disabled by injury or disease, has become a civic pioneer, a voice of advocacy, and, perhaps most crucially, a family for persons like Guillermo De La Rosa, Francisco Cedillo, and “Maria” (last name not provided due to undocumented status).
Guillermo, just 19-years-old at the time of his injury, was helping a friend remove an engine from a pick-up truck when it began rolling off the ramp. As he tried to get out of the way, an iron rod sticking out of the truck penetrated his neck, piercing his spinal cord. Doctors told him he would never be able to move anything beneath his shoulders again.
Francisco was in a pool hall in 1999 when he was alerted by a waitress that some guys at another pool table had gone out to meddle with his car in the parking lot. He went out to see and discovered that they had broken in and were attempting to steal his car stereo. He confronted them and they argued fiercely. Suddenly, one of them got behind him and he felt a blow on his back. It was a tire iron, hitting him on the vertebral column. The next day he was told he would never walk again. His fiancé broke off their engagement within weeks.
Maria was in a car accident with her boyfriend, their wedding a month away. She broke two of her vertebrates while her boyfriend died en route to the hospital.
“When you have an accident,” says Guillermo, “the first thing you think about is wanting to die. Living Hope has helped many people continue living.” He is now the organization’s communications lead, performing community outreach and responding to the calls of the newly paralyzed. Francisco helps to remedy the legal, cultural, and linguistic obstacles that impede those in need from receiving services. Maria is now mother to a precocious four-year-old and Living Hope’s data navigator – she locates food banks, rental assistance, free medical care, and anything else that can help fill the security gaps.
“After an accident, we are born again,” says Guillermo. “It is as if we are children again. The new life may be more difficult, but we can live it well and we can be useful to humanity. Sometimes you are at home in pain, depressed, and you come here and forget everything,. Everything changes when I arrive at the office and work with my colleagues.”
These are just a few of
those members whose lives have been forever fractured by spinal injuries that
make up Living Hope.
Although Living Hope had from its beginnings a political impulse to spur social and legal change for the disabled, the group’s efforts during Hurricane Harvey in 2017 abruptly provided it with a mandate to speak out about the social injustices they saw inflicted upon their community as they took part in the recovery efforts from the storm. In the aftermath of Harvey, members witnessed the manner in which emergency information often failed to reach immigrant populations.
They saw also that the government-provided shelters were not sufficiently equipped in most cases to accommodate the wheelchair-bound. Of grave significance was the fact that the catastrophic economic damages wrought by the hurricane, such as the destruction of the trailer parks in which many of them lived, and the wheelchair ramps that they depended on, didn’t meet the minimum dollar amount necessary to qualify for government reconstruction aid. Around them, hundreds of handicapped people were caught in flooded and ruined homes with no safety net to turn to– their inability to flee and their physical and social isolation compounded by their undocumented status and the fear of contacting the official rescue channels.
Living Hope’s volunteers sought out those who were slipping through the cracks. Volunteers hunted up cash grants for those whose houses had been ruined. They found case management workers for them and established better support systems. They found and matched partner organizations to coordinate rescues and distribute medical supplies. They provided legal counsel when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had been contacted.
Volunteers gained confidence and political fluency in exposing the public policy barriers to meaningful recovery, including a lack of affordable and safe housing, a lack of shelters equipped for persons in wheelchairs, the fear of ICE enforcement that discouraged those in need from seeking refuge in a shelter, language barriers for those seeking food, outdated processes for receiving recovery aid and a preference for homeowners over renters.
Providing a Life With Dignity to Its Members
From their own experience, the leadership knows that isolation and access to medical supplies, special equipment, and quality health care are the main barriers that must be overcome by the wheelchair-bound community to have a good quality of life. Living Hope has come to provide a spiritual haven where members find culture, recreation, community, faith, and friendship. . But it also has grown to provide access to employment and job training. It now counsels members on how to create small businesses and organize a cooperative. It connects them to adequate housing and health services. It facilitates family support coaching for the newly disabled, guides its member to education opportunities, trains them in leadership development, and spearheads policy campaigns to rectify problems in public transportation, immigrant rights, worker rights, and disability rights.
For more information on the next distribution date or to request or donate supplies please email lhwa@lhwassociation.org or call their office at 281-764-6251.
