Between the Naperville Rotary clubs, Chamber of Commerce, local businesses and friends, Diveheart has received amazing friendship and support from the Naperville community since 2001.
If you’re unfamiliar with Diveheart, let me tell you how it started.
Ever since 1976, I’ve known that scuba diving was therapeutic and beneficial for people, and especially for individuals with disabilities. I’m the son of an Army veteran with a disability and the father of a blind daughter. In my youth, I also was tutored through Boy Scouts by a one-armed scout master and walked with my Cub Scout friend Timmy with Cerebral Palsy to school so that bullies would not pick on him.
This background gave me the solid footing to understand individuals with disabilities and the sometimes not-so-friendly world around them.
As a young journalist at the College of DuPage, with no special interest in scuba diving, I took a scuba class in the event I’d ever have to interview someone like Jacques Cousteau.
It was love at first dive!
Decades later in 1997, after guiding and teaching blind skiers since the mid-1980s, I became a scuba diving instructor, working with people with a variety of disabilities.
Then I went on to found Diveheart in 2001, a nonprofit organization dedicated to serving children, veterans and other individuals with disabilities, using adaptive scuba and scuba therapy as tools to help them “Imagine the possibilities” in their lives.
In the beginning, managers at Holiday Inn Select-Naperville, then located along Diehl Road, were among the first that gave me the opportunity to use their indoor pool for instruction.
I never dreamed that Diveheart would be more than a small local charity. However, when COVID hit, after serving thousands of individuals around the world, I had to cancel 200 pool programs around the U.S. alone, and 14 adaptive scuba trips for people with disabilities.
To say the least, Diveheart had grown since 2001. I knew it was making a difference. This story is the first to acquaint a new audience with the work we do at Diveheart.
