Nancy Bottelo has focused for five years on bringing a sports and wellness center to Oahu to serve the state’s thousands of adults and children with intellectual disabilities, and she remembers when a parent from Hilo handed her $20.
"Put it toward the facility," she recalls the parent told her. "Every time I take my child to Oahu, I’m going to drive him out there and tell him, ‘This is for you.’"
"It really did give me chicken skin," said Bottelo, president and CEO of Special Olympics Hawaii, "because $20 was a big thing for them. That wasn’t just something they could easily give up."
Special Olympics Hawaii plans to build a $10 million multipurpose center in Kapolei that will serve as a hub and training site for Special Olympics participants statewide. It will also serve as a health and wellness center where adults and children with intellectual disabilities can receive free physical exams, hearing, vision, dental and podiatry screenings, and wellness and nutrition education.
According to Bottelo, individuals with intellectual disabilities have a 40 percent greater risk of suffering from preventable secondary health conditions than the general population.
"What’s really important to me is the health and wellness things we’ll be doing there," she said. "Dental care, especially for our adults with intellectual disabilities, is absolutely horrific."
Special Olympics Hawaii chose to build in Kapolei partly because nearly 5,000 students are enrolled in special-education programs in Leeward Oahu schools, Bottelo said.
Special Olympics Hawaii serves more than 2,700 athletes statewide, from toddlers to adults in their 80s.
"We’re going to significantly grow our population base," Bottelo said. "I couldn’t project a number off the top of my head, but it’s going to significantly grow."
The Matson Foundation recently offered Special Olympics Hawaii a $25,000 lead donation to help bring the organization closer to completing its first capital campaign.
"What we found is that everybody’s waiting for somebody else to say ‘yes’ first," Bottelo said. "Matson stepping up is huge for us. … I think we really needed Matson to do this to help people see somebody is really supporting this; it’s going to move forward."
Matt Cox, CEO of Matson, said the company decided to establish the Matson Foundation earlier this year after it split from Alexander & Baldwin and moved its headquarters to Honolulu.
"One of our first largest donations (so far) was our pledge towards this new facility," Cox said. "The timing was perfect for us."
Matson has been a big supporter of the Special Olympics Summer Games since 1988, when it first sponsored a softball throw event, and more than 100 employees and their family members volunteer for the games each year.
Cox said helping to fund the facility was a "no-brainer" because it "just feels like the right thing to do."
"I think part of being a Hawaii company is recognizing the responsibility we have to support and make better the community in which we work and live," he said by telephone. "It made all kinds of sense for us to participate."
Additional funding will come from the state Legislature, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and other sources. The Department of Hawaiian Home Lands is leasing the land.
Bottelo said 61 percent of Special Olympics athletes from Leeward Oahu are Hawaiian or part-Hawaiian, and a strong partnership is developing between DHHL and her organization.
"It’s going to be great for both of us," she said.
Having a multipurpose center will allow Special Olympics Hawaii to expand on its current services. For example, Bottelo said, health screenings will be able to occur year-round instead of just at the Summer Games, and a Young Athlete program designed for helping 2- to 5-year-olds with motor skills and socialization will be able to convene on a more-than-monthly basis.
"(Having) everything in one place will just make it so much easier to provide services," she said.
Bottelo estimated that running the facility and all its programs in a central location will cost just as much as it does now to rent office space in downtown Honolulu and manage a separate warehouse.
"For us, that will be a huge impact," she said. "We won’t have to worry about rent going up and all those things."
The Special Olympics Hawaii board of directors looked long and hard for roughly three years at how to best go about opening a sports and wellness center, Bottelo said. Renting or buying an existing building were also looked at as options before the organization decided to build.
"It wasn‘t something we took lightly," she said. "We really took it slow to make sure this is something we could do, something we should do and that it would really benefit our athletes and (their) family members."
Construction could begin on the new facility as soon as early next year, but more funding still needs to be secured.
Bottelo said parents, like the one who handed her $20, have mobilized an "I Can" committee to raise money for the project by collecting change in cans.
She said parents of people with intellectual disabilities are often told what their child can’t do, so instead "they’re going to say, ‘We can help make this happen.’"
