Building Confidence, Independence and Self-Esteem, One Dive at a Time
By Matt Beardmore
For many of us, walking is an ability we often take for granted.
For others, like Barbara Mabbs, the opportunity to be upright and watch her feet propel her body forward is a moment of pure joy.
In “Adapting to Dive,” a 2022 award-winning documentary about Diveheart, a Downers Grove-based nonprofit that has been providing educational scuba diving programs to children, adults and veterans for nearly a quarter century, travel with Mabbs and other adaptive divers to Cozumel, Mexico, where many memorable and emotional moments are chronicled during one of the organization’s adaptive scuba trips.
In one of the documentary’s most impactful scenes – and one you need to keep rewatching to fully soak in what you are witnessing – Mabbs, who is a wheelchair user due to an unknown degenerative disease, is filmed walking on the Caribbean seafloor by director David Marsh’s brother, Scott. The only aid Mabbs received came from one of her accompanying dive buddies holding the bottom of her scuba tank.
On land, limitations are part of Mabbs’ everyday struggles. Underwater, as Diveheart says, “we’re all equal.”
“When I’m underwater, I can escape gravity, I can get out of my chair, I’m totally free,” Mabbs said in the film. “I don’t have to think about the day-to-day annoyances that I have to deal with. It’s just so calming.”
The benefits go far beyond that as adaptive divers in Diveheart’s programs can experience reduced pain, increased range of motion, relief from respiratory issues, improved self-esteem and independence, and the ability to trust and create social connections.
“Scuba diving is flying, it’s freedom, it’s like being a superhero and an astronaut,” said Jim Elliott, Diveheart founder and president. “The whole act of breathing under water and then to get someone out of a wheelchair and stand up for the first time since an injury, it’s a powerful combination that changes lives very quickly.”
The organization’s adaptive scuba adventure trips to spots such as Cozumel, Grenada, and Roatán, Honduras, are life-changing as well. Diveheart Executive Director Tinamarie Hernandez describes these week-long experiences, like the one chronicled in “Adapting to Dive,” as “family reunions” as divers, dive buddies and instructors reconnect and celebrate each other and their successes, both in the water and out.
These trips also provide Elliott and Hernandez, who has been in her role with the organization for a decade, with time to reflect on how far Diveheart has come since Elliott founded the nonprofit in 2001. During the last two-plus decades, Diveheart has impacted the lives of countless adaptive divers around the world, it has trained thousands of scuba instructors and dive buddies who create Adaptive Dive Teams with the adaptive divers, and it has helped spin off 50 nonprofits worldwide. And to think, when Elliott, a former media advertising executive, launched Diveheart, his vision of the organization was it being a “little club thing with the biggest fundraiser of the year being a pizza party.”
Today, Diveheart is looking to make a major splash, as it is in the midst of a $300 million fundraising campaign that, if successful, could lead to the construction of the world’s deepest warm water therapy pool at 130 feet.
“The pool will be a worldwide destination for research, rehabilitation, education, and training, and it will provide vocational opportunities as well,” Lake County Partners, which helped Diveheart find the North Chicago location for the Diveheart Education & Research Facility, wrote in a Feb. 1, 2024, blog post. “The 130 ft. depth of the pool is important because it allows Diveheart to replicate the benefits of deep open water diving without the unknowns of weather, water movement, and other factors that limit opportunities for research and rehabilitation.”
As part of its Deep Pool Project, Diveheart is also looking to fund an endowment to help increase access to the proposed facility, Hernandez said.
Diveheart currently holds three patents on the facility’s deep pool design, but the “rights granted by a U.S. patent extend only throughout the territory of the United States and have no effect in a foreign country,” according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Diveheart’s proposed facility could take two years to build.
“We’re in a race right now to build this before someone builds it elsewhere,” Elliott said.
In Downers Grove, where Elliott has lived since he was 14 and Diveheart has a new Outreach Center at 5147 Main Street in downtown, the organization is requesting fellow Chamber630 members’ help in finding additional local pools where it can serve adaptive divers. Currently, the nonprofit’s Chicagoland Diveheart Scuba Experience programs take place at a pool at the Downers Grove DoubleTree Suites and at Oak Lawn High School nearly 20 miles away from its Outreach Center.
“We could really benefit from being able to use more pools,” Elliott said. “We could serve more people instead of them having to travel out of the service area.”
For more information on Diveheart’s programs, the Diveheart Education & Research Facility, and how to become involved with the organization, please visit https://www.diveheart.org and https://www.youtube.com/@DiveheartFoundation/playlists.
Adapting to Dive can be viewed for free here on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFzbZcB1A6g
