May’s Community Spotlight is on Erik Kondo!

Erik has been a wheelchair user for over four decades. During this time, he has been involved in a wide variety of adaptive sports and recreational activities, from martial arts to wheelchair electric skateboarding.

We are spotlighting Erik because of his current mission to help his fellow wheelchair users both in the United States and internationally by creating DIY wheelchair prototypes and making his designs available for others to emulate on his website www.OpenSourceWheelchairs.org.

Erik became passionate about making DIY wheelchairs out of commonly available materials such as wood and PVC due to his connections with people with spinal cord injury in low-resource countries such as Pakistan, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria.

“I keep encountering people with disabilities who literally have had no wheelchair for over ten years. They have no way to get around and are stuck in bed all day. My thought was that it can’t be that hard to make some type of wheelchair. I will make one and prove it,” says Erik.

In addition to creating open-source wheelchair designs, Erik ships used wheelchairs and donated medical supplies directly to a group of people with spinal cord injuries in Zimbabwe through his nonprofit NOT-ME! Inc. He uses his network to purchase wheelchairs overseas and provide them to individuals in Nigeria and Pakistan.

Erik also runs an eBay store called DIY Wheelchair Supply, which sells inexpensive essential wheelchair parts such as off-road and street wheels, casters, forks, and brakes sourced from China. The profits from his eBay sales are used to fund his nonprofit activities. The idea is to enable wheelchair users to obtain affordable parts to either repair their primary wheelchair or use the parts to fabricate a DIY wheelchair.

On a final note, not only does Erik create wheelchair designs, but he also uses his prototypes extensively for participating in road races from 5Ks to marathons and for wheelchair hiking in the woods.

To learn more about Erik’s projects, go to www.OpenSourceWheelchairs.org. You can follow Erik on Instagram via @Wheelchairboarding, or visit his eBay store https://www.ebay.com/str/diywheelchairsupply