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Opportunity Foundation of Central Oregon:
Providing Meaningful Work, Meaningful Lives*

By Alan Guggenheim
Member Services Director

One day, 45 years ago, a local cattle broker named Walter Franks took a drive up Highway 97 from his ranch just south of Bend, where Sunriver is now located.

A careful and considerate—some might say typical—cowboy, Franks slowed down as he passed by a crowd of parents and their children milling around their broken down vehicle on the side of the road.

"What's the problem?" he asked.

Well, so the story goes, they were on their way to a get-together at a makeshift "school" in somebody's home. The parents had organized their own cooperative school so their children could learn and play and socialize with one another, like other children without disabilities.

Franks noticed the children had developmental disabilities. But he was the kind of person who noticed "differences," not "defects." He wondered out loud why the parents had to provide their own special-needs school system. That's when one of the parents shocked him with the explanation: In Oregon, local school districts were not responsible for educating students with disabilities.

"What? That's not right," Franks is recalled having said. Like a horse-kick to the head, he added in utter astonishment, "Everybody deserves an opportunity to go to school."

Filled with the spirit of those parents he met on the side of the road in the fall of 1964, Franks rustled up 10 directors who shared his vision for a community that cares about its citizens with disabilities. They were Dr. Robert Corrigan, Judge D.L. Penhollow, Cecil Sly, Ron Culbertson, I.R. Robin, Louise Hyatt, Bruce Bates, George Marshall, George Smith and a young lawyer fresh out of Lewis & Clark's Northwestern School of Law, Ron Bryant.

Bryant and Bates signed the articles incorporating the Opportunity Foundation, the first community mental health center east of the Cascades, and submitted them to the state. They were stamped and approved February 15, 1965, by Frank J. Healy, a blind man who overcame his own disability to become Oregon Corporation Commissioner.

Today, the Opportunity Foundation of Central Oregon is a thriving nonprofit organization with 152 employees and a $6.2 million annual budget. It provides seven homes and jobs in retail, manufacturing and business services specially tailored for 170 people with developmental disabilities in Jefferson, Crook and Deschutes counties.

Its beginnings were a bit more humble.

During the first year of the foundation, Franks anonymously made two donations totaling $100,000 for an architectural design by Wilmsen, Endicott and Unthank of Portland of a 4,972-square-foot, hexagonal school-in-the- round" to be located on 26 acres of land east of Redmond.

Dozens of local residents, businesspeople and service club members built the sombrero-shaped structure, free of halls, to accommodate 40 to 50 children, living, learning and socializing with staff and one another in classrooms, kitchen facilities, arts and crafts studios, and a common multipurpose area.

In 1967, the foundation added what may be the most important of its services for adults with disabilities: jobs. Adults with disabilities were offered paying jobs, tailored to their disabilities. This would be the future for the Opportunity Foundation.

"Work is key to developing personal responsibility and pride," says Urmi Boyd, resource director for the Opportunity Foundation. "With that paycheck, the people here can make their own budgets, pay bills, set goals and realize dreams, like going on vacation to Disneyland.

Franks died in 1972. Fortunately, many others shared his dream and extended his vision to include three thrift stores, the first opening in Redmond in 1973, with stores later opening in Madras and Bend.

In 1978, in response to a new federal law, local school districts started taking responsibility for educating students with disabilities. The Opportunity Foundation closed the school and shifted its full attention to vocational and residential programs aimed at improving work and living habits for the 1.5 percent of Central Oregon's general population who were born with some form of disability.

The vocational program centered around the workplace, where clients could learn jobs such as manufacturing surveyor stakes, pallets, boxes, butcher blocks and other items. They also could provide custodial and business services, including confidential document
shredding, assembly, sorting, mailing and packaging, among other services.

The residential programs were devised by a young psychologist, Darrel Wilson, who joined the Opportunity Foundation fresh out of college in 1975. On his way to Portland, Wilson was brimming with new ideas and thought he would test them "for a couple of years" in Central Oregon.

Wilson spearheaded the Community Living Program in 1979 that provided budgeting, bill paying, menu planning, grocery shopping and other life skills, so people with disabilities could live as independently as possible.

Wilson is now executive director of Opportunity Foundation.

"In those days, individuals with mental retardation and related conditions had almost no opportunities to live as independently as possible," he says. "I wanted to make a difference, at least for a couple of years, by starting programs in Central Oregon."

He and the evolving board of directors and the hundreds of dedicated employees have made a difference.

In addition to the three thrift stores, the Opportunity Foundation operates seven group homes, soon to be eight; an archipelago of assembly and packaging programs in Redmond, Bend and Madras; a custodial services company; and a program providing alternatives to employment for people with disabilities.

Wilson is a little balder in 2009, but still brimming with ideas.

"Our story is your story," he says. "We are all fellow travelers on life's path. Disability is a fundamental part of all our lives. Sooner or later, almost every person will experience disability in very personal ways."

Wilson says it is time to rethink disability, to resist stumbling into pity and shock.

"Pity is itself disabling for you, me and for the person with the disability," he says. "Pity pushes away. It shuts down communication and creativity. People with disabilities do not want our pity — they want our respect.

"When we focus on a person's limitations, we miss what they can do. The real question is not what a person cannot do, but rather what they can do, with or without support, to reach their potential.

"The paradox is that through personal experience with disability, we grow to be more compassionate, more caring and loving, and more connected in spiritual relationship with our creator. It is time to rethink disability, to recognize it as something that connects us with the most important parts of life. It doesn't get any better than that."

*Article appeared in Ruralite Magazine, June 2009. Reprinted with permission.