Marine Noah Currier had recently returned to the United States from military service in Iraq when his life changed forever.
He’d been riding in a military vehicle when a fellow Marine fell asleep at the wheel outside Camp Pendleton in California. The truck hit a tree and fell down a hill, flipping over a dozen times. Currier woke up in the hospital a week later, paralyzed from the chest down. He was just 21 at the time.
After the tragedy, the Boone County resident fell into a long depression that left him holed up in his bedroom for years. One day, on a whim with the nudge of a friend, he participated in a sporting event designed for veterans with disabilities. There, he felt the spark for life reignite.
“I felt like my trajectory started changing, and I started looking at life a little bit differently,” said Currier, 41.
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Currier has never looked back. He signed up for extreme physical feats like sky diving and completed his academic goals by going back to school. Eventually, he played competitively in the National Veteran Wheelchair Games.
Now 20 years after his accident, Currier is leading efforts on a state-of-the-art facility that raises the bar for what accessible facilities can look like for veterans — and gives other wounded veterans an entry point to similar physical activities, like the ones that turned his life around.
Currier’s nonprofit, the Oscar Mike Foundation, headquartered in Marengo, plans to build the facility, dubbed Project: Welcome Home, in the Rockford area on 100 acres at the corner of Illinois 76 and Orth Road in Timberlane. The building will at first feature accessible lodging for up to 24 people, along with a 20,000-square-foot adaptive gym and 10,000 square feet reserved for dining and recreation.
To design the facility, Oscar Mike tapped the Chicago office of the architectural firm Gensler, where Marine Corps veteran Brett Taylor leads a design team that has produced early renderings for the campus. Gensler also designed the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab on Northwestern’s downtown medical campus. The AbilityLab was designed with a similar theme of rehabilitation and accessibility despite a different clientele, Taylor said.
For the Oscar Mike compound, designers focused on creating an intimate community space while at the same time prioritizing spaces large enough for physical activity. Plans for the building include a training gym, off-roading track, obstacle course, accessible trails, marksmanship lanes and the first wheelchair rugby courts in the world.
Designers are also hoping to change the culture around accessibility in construction, Taylor said, by encouraging developers to think of accessibility at the onset of projects.
The new facility just east of Rockford is starting from scratch on a chunk of farmland owned by the same family for generations. Currier said he would drive by the land often and contacted the family of farmers who were moving on after 150 years.
“It’s probably the most beautiful piece of property in the town,” Currier said. “They had no intentions on really ever selling the farm or the land until they heard what we were trying to do and they agreed to help us out with it.”
A larger goal of the facility is to reimagine what constitutes a building as accessible, particularly for veterans reentering civilian life after being injured in the line of duty.
“They are people who have already gone through the fight of their life in conflict, not for politics, not for policy, not for anything other than the men and women to their left and right. And then now they are challenged with the second fight of their life and that is coming back to the world that is largely not built around them,” said Matt Disher, a Marine Corps veteran and lead of the military veterans program at Cushman and Wakefield, who is managing the Oscar Mike project.
Taylor explained how even choices for building materials such as a flooring for a basketball court that offers more resistance for wheelchairs or textures for couches that are firmer and less slippery can make daily activities easier for veterans with disabilities.
To the team’s knowledge, there is not a facility dedicated to veterans that is as extensively designed for accessibility as this Oscar Mike facility. Once built and opened to the country, Taylor said he hopes the compound can serve as a prototype.
“These types of facilities are few and far between and they’re necessary” for veterans to recover physically and mentally, Taylor said.
The current Oscar Mike program is housed in a 9,000-square-foot facility in Poplar Grove that Currier said operates “basically like a giant home.” More than 1,100 veterans have participated in adaptive programs at the compound, according to the foundation’s website, coming from around the world to spend a week at the facility.
But space is so limited at the current building that Currier said Oscar Mike cut down advertising and marketing efforts to avoid turning veterans away due to lack of space. In August 2022, 4.9 million veterans, or 27% of all veterans, had a service-connected disability, the U.S. Department of Labor reported.
A $15 million fundraising campaign launched Friday at the annual Oscar Mike ball to raise money for the facility. An initial $2 million donation in seed money had already been secured to kick-start the campaign.
Project managers said construction bids are being considered and building the facility would take roughly 18 months from start to finish after breaking ground. The village of Timberlane approved a special-use permit for the facility in September 2022.
Currier launched the Oscar Mike Foundation on Veterans Day in 2011 with a mission to offer veterans ways to mobilize. Even the foundation’s name encourages mobility, coming from military lingo meaning “On the Move.”
The foundation began in a two-car garage, with four veterans in wheelchairs who all shared a common goal to make adaptive sports more available.
“We had big dreams, but we didn’t have a clue what we were doing,” Currier said. “We just wanted to help our brothers and sisters out.
Most participants in the adaptive programs are veterans of the Gulf Wars, Currier said, but facilities serve veterans of any time of service and military branch.
“What we all had in common was that dark spot after our accidents where we kind of lost ourselves whether you were hurt in Iraq or you were hurt somewhere else,” Currier said.
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But veterans are able to visit the facility at any point after their service, not just immediately following injury, Currier said, because healing “is a constant process of education.”
“I’m still learning new things every week on the rugby court.”