Toddler mobility chairs bring joy to J’lem children

Yehudah Uliel smiled big on Wednesday afternoon as he spun around for the first time in his new toddler mobility trainer. The small wooden chair, made that afternoon by students at Hadassah Academic College in Jerusalem, would enable the toddler with spina bifida to move more easily and with less pain.

“I am excited,” his mother Yehudit Uliel said. “This is very emotional.”

Yehudah was one of 13 children who received the special wheelchair this week. They were made on Wednesday at a “building party” hosted by Hadassah with Azrieli College. The event was organized by Tikkun Olam Makers (TOM) as part of the “Making Peace” project supported by USAID.

Maayan Keren, director of TOM@University, explained that the wheelchair serves children from six months to three years old who cannot mobilize independently.

“The students build the product, and they get to see the impact right there, in front of their eyes,” Keren said. “They see the kids coming in and being placed on the chair, and within five minutes, the kids roll around. A lot of times, it’s the first time they’re able to move independently. So it’s impactful, not just for the kid, but also for the families and everybody involved.”

The US Embassy participated in the project, bringing staff to help build the chairs in anticipation of opening its own “maker space” at the American Center in Jerusalem. This public programming platform will allow the embassy to engage directly with youth and young professionals.

Public Diplomacy Officer Caroline Nohr said the embassy chose to get involved with TOM because “it’s not just technology for technology’s sake, but we’re accomplishing something that contributes to society.”

TOM was founded in 2004 by Gidi Grinstein.

Today, the program is in 70 communities and has created nearly 214,000 projects. The university program is in 11 countries and on 62 campuses.

TOM is about making affordable and accessible solutions for people with disabilities.

“There’s a saying that 90% of innovation serves 10% of the population with the purchasing power,” Grinstein explained. “So, the people at the bottom of the economic ladder are structurally excluded from the benefits of innovation. We’re trying to reverse that.”

The program does this by crowdsourcing willing constituencies to contribute their skills and by creating a global repository of their solutions. Everything TOM’s “makers” create is digitized and open-sourced so that anybody can download and recreate their plans anywhere in the world.

“We’ve standardized or regulated the innovation process, which allows people to come in, do their bit, deposit whatever they did, and then allows other people to move in,” Grinstein said.

“The other funnel is about the distribution,” he continued, “which we see at Hadassah. The product is fully documented, and they just need to manufacture it.”

Toddler wheelchairs for kids like the ones built on Wednesday are generally not covered by insurance, and buying one could be very expensive. The TOM model costs only around NIS 250.

The other aspect of TOM is public diplomacy.

“We believe that humanitarian work is the best way to bridge cultural, political, and national lines. There are Palestinian-Arab people here, Jews – religious, haredi [ultra-Orthodox] and secular,” Grinstein said. “We have been able to work in all kinds of countries, from Morocco to the UAE, Bahrain, Jordan, and Turkey.

“As [the late] rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks said, ‘The best way to heal a broken society is to build things together.’”