Team Wheelhouse Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit using automotive culture to change the conversation around mental health — one paddock, one garage, one long drive at a time.
Our founder Chris was 15 years old, with a reading disability he had no language for, getting checked into lockers in the halls and laughed at when he tried to read out loud. He had depression and anxiety before he had words for either. He told nobody. Not his parents. Not a friend. Not one person.
For a long stretch of those years, the question in his head wasn’t whether to ask for help. It was whether to keep going at all. Stigma had built a wall around what he was carrying — and he’d convinced himself he didn’t deserve to come out from behind it.
What broke the silence wasn’t a breakthrough. It wasn’t an intervention. It was a sprint car in the back of a body shop, and a mentor who kept asking, in the middle of fixing things together, how’s life? Car culture didn’t care how Chris spelled. It cared if he showed up. For the first time, he had somewhere he belonged.
He’s 40 now. He’s climbed Aconcagua. He’s raced at 140 miles an hour. None of that exists if he hadn’t survived being 15.
Team Wheelhouse Foundation is what happens when you turn around and try to build — on purpose — the same thing that saved you. For everyone else still inside that silence.
Read about the keynote →The short documentary about the years before Team Wheelhouse — bullying, depression, a sprint car in the back of a body shop, and a mentor who kept asking how’s life? It’s the metaphor that taught one 15-year-old he could rebuild himself the same way he rebuilt a motor. Twelve minutes that explain why this foundation exists.
Every event, every conversation. Mental health work isn’t loud. It’s consistent.
The garage, the paddock, the passenger seat — these are valid places to say something is wrong.
We’re a bridge to people who do this professionally, not a substitute for them.
501(c)(3) · Tax-deductible · EIN 82-1201615