Mission

Our endeavor plan and purpose is to provide a basic human right, mobility, to those who have little hope.  Mobility - Health - Dignity - Access are what we offer by providing a way to greater mobility. Another benefit of this effort is the value of recyling. Each donated mobility device is one less item destined to poison a landfill, making this a win, win situation.

"Hope lies in dreams, in imagination and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality."           Jonas Salk

History

Crutches 4 Africa started twice.

The first time it began was in the spring of 1955.  A young couple had taken their two-year-old son into Children’s Hospital, Denver,  Colorado because when he woke up one Saturday morning, he was paralyzed.  It was polio. Two weeks earlier, Dr. Saulk had announced that the polio vaccine had been successfully developed.  Sometimes in  life, timing is everything.

That boys' timing has gotten much better since then.

Then in the early part of this century, this same polio survivor, now in his fifties, was working on a documentary film for another  organization in Africa when he saw a woman, with her right leg twisted up behind her, her foot pressed up against the back of her shoulder.  She was struggling to move about, using a gnarly, green tree branch for a crutch, the rough, torn off part of the branch being used under her arm for support.  She sort of “pole vaulted” along.  This was the second beginning of Crutches 4 Africa.

The idea is simple. Here in North America, we have a vast surplus of crutches, canes, walkers & wheelchairs.

Everyday hundreds, if not thousands of these “mobility devices” are buried in landfills all across the country,  many of them barely used.  In garages, sheds, and basements they lie forgotten and unused until the day comes that they “get the pitch” and into the rubbish bin they go!  The goal of Crutches 4 Africa is to rescue these mobility tools and get them into the hands of  people that desperately need them. 

“This is the best kind of recycling!”  says David Talbot, founder of Crutches 4 Africa,

“you don’t have to melt them down to make them into something else, they are ready to go just as they are”. 

The scope of the project is to collect mobility devices, store them until a quantity have been accumulated, then ship them to Africa and distribute them (for free) to the mobility challenged people there. Then, repeat the process.

Thank you!