OUR STORY

We began our married life in a one-bedroom basement apartment for $75 a month, furnished with wedding gifts and garage-sale treasures. Attending the University of Utah, we were full-time students, working part-time jobs, spending each spare minute creating our new life together. Raised in wonderful families of modest means, we each recognized the need to be self-reliant from the outset.

That pattern of hard work and living within our modest means brought great blessings. A few years and a lot of adventures later, we left Stanford with PhD in hand, heading east with $3200 in loans and a determination to pay those off as soon as possible. Our first “real” paycheck was $1,000 per month and, within a few years, our home mortgage was our only debt. Still, when we returned to Stanford nine years later, we had five children and a new, “California-sized” mortgage. We set a goal to pay that off and never replace it. Our Stanford years were prosperous ones, filled with peace, happiness and love in our home, as well as material gains derived from opportunities to help former students cultivate successful businesses. Our hard work, supplemented by an abundance of blessings from our loving Heavenly Father, helped us meet our debt-free goal by the time we returned to Harvard in 1988.

Before long, our family’s means far exceeded our needs, and we began seeking ways to bless others with both our time and our prosperity. In 1999, we determined we were ready to retire from career life and devote our full-time efforts to service, wherever our faithful path would lead us.

That fall, we were asked to preside over the England London Mission (July 2000-June 2003). We loved serving with over 500 young missionaries from all around the world. In addition to the blessings of learning much about missionary work, we also discovered that many of those youth needed encouragement, counsel and financial support to successfully launch their post-mission adult lives. With some long-distance help, we created the Wheelwright Family Foundation in 2001 and immediately began making financial grants to home-bound missionaries pursuing higher education.

Our next service opportunity fit beautifully with our love of education and assisting young adults: we headed to BYU-Idaho as senior missionaries, working alongside our good friends, Kim and Sue Clark, in the university’s administration during a time of growth and transformation.

After just one year in Rexburg, we were invited to take up new responsibilities on a different campus and in a much warmer climate. In March of 2007, President Gordon B. Hinckley invited us to Hawaii to preside over the church’s university there. Our BYU-Hawaii years (June 2007-July 2015) were punctuated with countless blessings, including the opportunity to see firsthand how so many in the Pacific Rim struggle to become self-reliant. Our love for the students, their homelands, and their faithful perseverance enriched our entire family’s lives greatly.

As our Hawaii years drew to a close, yet another opportunity for more service and even greater blessings appeared, this one seeming to bring us full circle. We were asked to preside over the Boston Temple, which we’d been privileged to be involved with from its inception many years earlier. We readily agreed to serve from November 2015 through October of 2018, knowing from repeated experience that we would be blessed beyond measure.

Recognizing that genuine retirement was now on the horizon (as our temple work would likely be our last full-time service for the LDS Church), and seeing how richly blessed our posterity has been over the years, we desired to redefine and expand our foundation and its scope, in order to involve multiple generations, including our grandchildren. Continued prosperity allowed us to redirect our retirement savings into funding this expanded mission to work together to provide hope and education to those within our varied spheres of stewardship.

Our sincere hope is that our example of lifelong service, coupled with the opportunities made possible by the Wheelwright Family Foundation, will not only enrich the lives and communities in which our extended family live, but will also allow each of our descendants to become actively involved in sharing their blessings with others. We have tried to design all aspects of the Foundation to assist our posterity in experiencing the joy and peace that come from compassionate service so they, too, will desire to share their abundance with those around them.