A Message from the ROC Wheels Board of Directors

After 27 years of giving children mobility, ROC Wheels is coming to the end of its mission.

In 1999, Wayne and Lee Hanson founded ROC Wheels on a simple idea: a child who cannot walk should still be able to move. 

Since then, our team has personally fitted and delivered over 1000 custom wheelchairs to children in underprivileged communities around the world. Every chair was built to grow with the child who received it. Every chair was fitted by hand, by a passionate team who traveled there to do it.

After much prayer and deliberation, our Board of Directors has made the difficult decision to close ROC Wheels. This wasn’t a failure of mission. It was a decision to close well, on our own terms, having done exactly what we set out to do for nearly three decades.

Every wheelchair impacts a community.

We’ve learned something in 27 years that numbers alone don’t capture: a wheelchair never changes just one life.

When a child receives a chair, their family changes too. We’ve met siblings who couldn’t go to school because they were needed at home to carry or care for a brother or sister with no way to move on their own. Give that child a wheelchair, and the sibling goes back to class. A parent who once had to carry that child everywhere, every day, finally gets a piece of their life back, time to work, to rest, to care for other children and their own health. A community starts to see a disabled child differently too. Instead of a child who has to be carried and left in one place, they see a child who can be wheeled from room to room, taken outside, brought along to school or church, included in the family’s day.

That ripple, from child, to family, to community, is the real math of what you helped build. It’s why we could never measure our work by chairs alone.

What happens next.

Our remaining wheelchair inventory will be entrusted to Casa de Esperanza, a trusted partner also based in Montana to serve children in Mexico who will continue identifying children in need and getting them fitted. The work of finding the next child who needs a chair does not stop with us. It continues in good hands.

We are working through the remaining steps of closing the organization properly, including final financial reporting and formally transferring what we can to organizations who will carry this work forward.

Thank you.

If you gave to ROC Wheels, whether it was a single donation, a decade of support, a volunteer weekend building trainers in our shop, or a delivery trip alongside our team, you are the reason over 1000 children are moving today who otherwise would not be. Bozeman, Montana is a small town that quietly changed lives across the globe for 27 years. That is your legacy as much as ours.

We are deeply grateful, and deeply proud of what we built together.

With gratitude, 

The ROC Wheels Board of Directors

Scott Bryant

Kristy Young

Kregg Aytes

Diane Donnelly

Martin Teintze

ROC Wheels, Inc. (Reach Out & Care Wheels) served children with mobility needs from 1999 to 2026. Questions about the closure, remaining funds, or our records can be directed to info@rocwheels.org.