Body
Back in 2000, 30-year-old Chicagoan, Eric Lipp, began waking up with numb arms. A scan revealed the cause was a tumor growing on his spinal cord and no local surgeon wanted to tackle the sensitive operation. Lipp flew to New York for the procedure, and when he woke up, he was paralyzed. That wasn’t even the worst news: Lipp, a recently married man, had a genetic condition that meant the tumors would keep appearing and he was likely to develop kidney cancer.
Lipp transferred to the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (now known as Shirley Ryan AbilityLab) for his rehabilitation care. He made rapid progress and eventually was able to walk with a cane although sometimes he needed a manual wheelchair. Despite being mobile again, Lipp realized that he wouldn’t be able to return to his old job as a sales representative for a tech company, a position that required him to fly into small airports around the country.
The nation’s airlines were largely exempt from the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act so they didn’t have to make reasonable accommodations for him and his wheelchair. “I realized I had to do something about this issue. I had to focus on travel, tourism and transportation for people with disabilities,” he says. “Getting around satisfies two important parts of life: work and play. So, I started the Open Doors Organization.”
Lipp wondered what he could do to get the travel and tourism industry’s attention. He raised $165,000 and spent it on a market study with a professional polling organization focusing on how much money people with disabilities spent on travel and tourism. He wrote a press release and paid a national newswire to distribute it.
Within half an hour, Lipp started getting calls from reporters with the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times who wanted to write stories about his findings. “We were trying to make the consumer the focus, make it less about disability and more about us as consumers. I knew companies needed to hear the figures, not another ‘woe is me’ story,” he says. Soon after the stories ran, Lipp got a call from Minnesota-based Northwest Airlines, which wanted to work with him. Not long after, American and Southwest Airlines called, too.
After a few years of pure advocacy, Lipp decided to use actor Paul Newman’s nonprofit as a model. Newman created a for-profit food business manufacturing salad dressing and pasta sauce to fund a nonprofit working on eliminating food insecurity. Lipp set about creating for-profit companies that would donate their proceeds to Open Doors to pay for its advocacy efforts. In the mid-2000s, Lipp launched Global Repair Group, a company that works for airlines repairing wheelchairs and scooters damaged in transit. Today, the subsidiary works with 35 airlines around the world, has 30 employees and generates millions in annual revenue.
More recently, Lipp started another business to handle the airline paperwork involved in getting service animals verified and approved to fly in an aircraft cabin. He confesses that he is appalled by how the service animal program has been abused by dog breeders and pet owners without disabilities who want their pets to travel for free and uncrated in an airplane cabin. “Right now, the most popular pet in the U.S. is the French Bulldog. No airline will carry one underneath in the cargo hold and you can’t out them in a carrier that fits under the seat,” Lipp says. “The only way a French Bulldog can travel is as a service animal but bulldogs don’t make good service animals. They don’t have the temperament for it. I’m collecting data and I think one day I will be able to prove that 90% of these requests are fake. I’m building a system so that I can start counting these cases that I suspect are fraud.”
Those are just two of the businesses and programs that Lipp has created as part of Open Doors. If you have a disability and have taken a cruise, ridden a train, stayed in a hotel or even visited a museum, you have probably benefitted from the organization’s efforts.
While most transportation, hospitality and tourism companies pay Open Doors for its consulting services, it provides some for free, including training airline baggage handlers in how to safely stow wheelchairs. “We want to keep putting the money back into programming, research, education and some social action. We don’t provide a lot of direct services for people with disabilities but you’ll see our work in every airport,” Lipp says.
If that weren’t enough to keep Lipp and his staff busy, Open Doors also partners with rehabilitation researchers like those at Indiana University (IU) and the Center for Rehabilitation Outcomes Research (CROR) at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. CROR and IU are currently working on a five-year, $2.5 million study looking at ways to make air travel more accessible for people with physical disabilities and mobility limitations. Open Doors plans to hold focus groups to gain input from the disability community and is developing training for airport-wheelchair pushers “to see if we can make the service more standardized,” Lipp says.
Indeed, many things have changed for the better since Lipp started Open Doors 25 years ago from his hospital bed, but he acknowledges that much more needs to be done before people with disabilities can travel with dignity and without fear. Yet he knows that Open Doors already has had a real and important impact for those with disabilities. “I started this organization because I wanted to make the lives of people with disabilities—and my life — easier. And I have. I used to wait hours for my wheelchair to come up from baggage. Now my chair comes up really fast,” he says. “That’s the most visible change I see.”