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Hi Nicely

What connects Botetourt County with the rehabilitation work done at the Woodrow Wilson Rehabilitation Center in Fishersville? Aside from the availability of the center to all Virginians, one connection lies in Daleville’s Hiawatha “Hi” Nicely, Jr., 62, now serving his second year as president of the board of the center’s support organization.
Unless you have known a patient at the center, which provides intensive rehabilitation services for those with a physical, mental, sensory and/or emotional disability, you may have not known about it. But the center helps “more than 330 [patients] a day, everything from a teenager with a broken neck, a quadriplegic, to a young man from this area who was electrocuted.
“He lost a leg and an arm from it. They virtually put that young man back to work after nine months of hospital and nine months of rehabilitation with prostheses,” Nicely said. “It’s just incredible. And they have gone from serving 250 a day to 330 with no staff increases.”
The foundation comes in. “We are looking to develop a continuous stream of funding at the highest level possible,” Nicely added. “When a state agency keeps cutting back, they [the therapists and doctors] never complain. They come in every day and do their job successfully. But it’s difficult for them to have to search for ways to get a little extra money.”
So the Woodrow Wilson Rehabilitation Center Foundation, Inc., takes on that search, under the current leadership of Nicely. The foundation targets businesses and individuals from across the state, asking of course for money, but also for things to be reused, such as wheelchairs and van accessories: “things people with disabilities need to get around.”
Nicely himself takes a lot of his time to help others. While living in Pulaski, he headed the Chamber of Commerce there. As rising president of the Botetourt Kiwanis club, he leads their efforts to serve this community. One important program distributes dictionaries to school children. He, his wife, Beverly, a teacher for the gifted in Roanoke, and two sons live in Botetourt so as to be within easy distance of family on both sides. Plus, he just loves it here.
Nicely’s consulting business helps groups looking to form community banks. An Allegehany County native, he formerly worked in the chemical and banking industries.
While helping to run a company in Radford in 1981 he worked with a sheltered workshop there. That workshop would find work for people with all types of disabilities, from the blind and deaf to mentally challenged. So he contracted some work out to them to wrap materials before shipping. “It was a great opportunity for us to get work done and help people who needed employment.”
This connection resulted in his working on the board of directors of the New River Valley Workshop, and then with his serving on the state rehabilitation council. He just ended eight years on that council, and now is part of the Region 32 Workforce Council, which covers Botetourt, Craig and the Roanoke area.
“My payback was seeing people who normally would not have been able to be employed become employed and loving to go to work every day.” And then he got even more opportunity to help. The chairman of the state rehabilitation council asked him to work with the Woodrow Wilson foundation to improve fundraising and broaden the board’s membership.
You can learn more about the foundation at their site, www.wwrcf.org. Nicely’s opinion? “Those therapists do miracles on a daily basis. They’re truly angels of the Lord the way they assist people and get them back into the mainstream of living.”