Joni and Friends
Joni and Friends was founded by Joni Eareckson Tada, a quadriplegic since 1967, and works on disability and the church. Wheels for the World collects donated manual wheelchairs in the United States, has them restored by inmates in prison-based restoration centres, and sends volunteer teams to hand-deliver and custom-fit them overseas with a Bible in the recipient’s language. Joni’s House runs centres for disabled children and families in several countries. The largest share of the budget, though, is domestic: retreats for families affected by disability in the United States, radio, and church training.
Global · United States
We read the ministry’s own pages and accreditations. We have not found published numbers we can divide, so no cost per outcome is shown.
We cannot tell you what $100 buys here
Joni and Friends has not published a spending figure and an outcome count that can be divided into each other. Any number we printed would be invented, so there is none. The specific documents we looked for are listed further down.
What the ministry advertises
“By fitting a person with a disability to a customized wheelchair, Wheels for the World provides hope for children and adults with disabilities in developing nations.”
“Each recipient receives a custom-fit wheelchair and hears the Gospel message. Recipients also receive a Bible in their language, get training in wheelchair use and upkeep, and have the opportunity to connect with a local Christ-honoring church.”
“Each year dedicated Joni and Friends volunteers collect thousands of used manual wheelchairs and other mobility equipment that would otherwise end up in landfills.”
Why this is the church’s work
The guest list Christ names for the banquet is the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind — the people who cannot repay. Scripture treats the exclusion of the disabled as the thing to be undone, not the disability itself, and it puts the body of Christ under obligation to the members it is tempted to treat as dispensable. A wheelchair, and a church that expects its user to be there, is that obligation in a concrete form.
“But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you.”
Luke 14:13–14
“On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honourable we clothe with greater honour.”
1 Corinthians 12:22–23
“Open your mouth for the mute, for the rights of all who are destitute. Open your mouth, judge righteously, defend the rights of the poor and needy.”
Proverbs 31:8–9
Doctrinal position we read: What We Believe, a published statement of belief — What we believe
Our reservations
- Most of the money is spent in the United States. The FY2025 Form 990 reports $22,688,206 on the retreat and family programmes — chiefly American — against $7,498,028 for Wheels for the World and $4,536,973 for Joni’s House. A donor giving because of the overseas wheelchair work should know it is the smaller part of the ministry.
- The two sets of accounts do not agree about the size of the programmes. The FY2025 audited statements report program services of $54,365,860; the FY2025 Form 990 reports total program service expenses of $38,759,679. That is a $15.6M difference in the same year, and neither document reconciles it for the reader.
- Donated wheelchair inventory was written down by $1,870,483 in a restatement disclosed in the FY2025 statements, reducing total assets and unrestricted net assets by the same amount. The valuation of donated chairs is the number the whole gifts-in-kind story rests on, and it moved by nearly two million dollars.
- Two legal entities file under this name — Joni and Friends (EIN 95-3402002) and the Joni and Friends Foundation (EIN 30-0815226) — with separate audits and separate 990s. Figures on this page are the operating ministry’s only.
- Wheelchairs are restored by inmates in United States prisons. The ministry frames this as redemptive purpose for the inmates, and it may well be, but prison labour in a charitable supply chain is a question a donor is entitled to ask about — terms, pay, voluntariness — and the site does not address it.
A judgement about the work, not a measurement of its results. We do not score souls.
Why a dollar goes further here
The chair itself is free: it is donated by an American family that no longer needs it, and it would otherwise have gone to landfill. Restoration labour is donated too. Volunteers collect, store and transport the chairs, and volunteer teams do the overseas fitting, so paid staff mostly coordinate rather than deliver. Delivery runs through local churches, which the ministry names as the connection point for each recipient. What a dollar buys here is logistics on top of donated goods and donated hours, which is a genuinely different cost structure from buying a new chair — but the ministry publishes no annual count, so we cannot show you what that structure costs per chair.
What creates the leverage
- Builds something that lasts — The money buys a well, a building or a piece of equipment that keeps delivering for years after the gift.
- Paid staff unlock unpaid hands — A small amount of paid coordination puts a much larger number of unpaid hours to work.
- Rides an existing network — Delivery runs through churches, schools or clinics that already exist and are already staffed, so the gift is not paying to build the channel.
The cost base, country by country
| Country | Income per person | Below United States |
|---|---|---|
| United States | $88,810 | — |
GNI per capita, Atlas method, current US dollars · World Bank · read 2026-09-19
This is a cost-of-living ratio, not a measure of how well the ministry spends. It tells you what a local wage or a bag of cement costs, and nothing about whether the work is any good — the rest of this page is for that.
Desk review
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- Gospel centrality
- A statement of belief is published, the programme descriptions are written in gospel terms, every wheelchair is delivered with a Bible and a church connection, and the founder’s public writing is unambiguously Christian. This is not a ministry whose faith has to be inferred.
- Is the gospel named and central, rather than implied by the ministry’s history?
- Local leadership
- Collection, restoration, governance and most spending are American, and the overseas distributions are done by volunteer teams travelling out from the United States rather than by local staff. Joni’s House operations are locally staffed, but they are the smallest of the three program lines.
- Is the work led and staffed by believers from the place it serves?
- Financial transparency
- Audited statements and Form 990s for both legal entities are posted on the ministry’s own financial documents page for every year from 2021 through 2025, including the restatement disclosure. The documents are complete; what they do not do is reconcile to each other.
- Can an outsider find audited statements, a Form 990, and accreditation?
- Evidence of outcomes
- This is a finding, not an absence of effort on our part. The ministry’s largest overseas programme is counted in wheelchairs, and no annual wheelchair figure is published on the programme page, in the audited statements, in the Form 990, or anywhere else we could find. The programme page says only “thousands”.
- Does the ministry publish counts of what was delivered, defined clearly enough to check?
- Cost per outcome is computable
- Spending is published to the line. There is no denominator at all, so there is nothing to divide. No cost per wheelchair, per recipient or per retreat family is advertised either.
- Are both a spending figure and an outcome count published, so cost per outcome can be divided out?
What we have not verified
- How many wheelchairs were delivered in FY2025, or in any year. This is the number the overseas programme turns on and we could not find it published anywhere. Without it there is no cost per chair on this page.
- How many people the retreat programme served, which is the largest single expense line at $22,688,206. No family count, no retreat count and no attendance figure is published with it.
- Why audited program services ($54,365,860) exceed 990 program service expenses ($38,759,679) by $15.6M in the same fiscal year. Different reporting rules can produce a gap this large; the documents do not say which ones apply here.
- What caused the $1,870,483 restatement of donated wheelchair inventory, and whether the valuation method for donated chairs has changed going forward.
- How donated wheelchairs are valued at all. Gifts in kind are the core of this model and the basis of valuation drives both the program total and the apparent efficiency of the ministry.
- The terms on which inmates restore the chairs — whether the work is paid, and how voluntary it is.
- Whether anyone outside the ministry has followed up a delivered chair. Nothing is published on how many are still in use after three to five years, which for a restored second-hand chair is the question that matters most.
Worth knowing
- We deliberately did not build a cost per wheelchair. We could have divided the $7,498,028 Wheels for the World program line by a chair count, and there is no chair count to divide it by; inventing one from the ministry’s “thousands” would be putting a number on the page that nobody has published.
- FY2025 audited figures for the operating ministry, year ended 31 December 2025: program services $54,365,860, management and administrative $6,031,130, fundraising $7,463,887, total expenses $67,860,877. Program services fell from $56,088,937 the year before.
- The FY2025 Form 990 Part III program lines are $22,688,206 (including $733,782 of grants) for the retreat and family programmes, $7,498,028 (including $6,845,984 of grants) for Wheels for the World, and $4,536,973 (including $1,401,950 of grants) for Joni’s House. Note that Wheels for the World is almost entirely grants out — the ministry funds partners to do the work rather than doing it on its own books.
- The wheelchair distribution model is unusual enough to be worth stating plainly: the chair is donated by an American household, restored by an inmate, flown or shipped out, and fitted by a volunteer. Very little of a donor’s dollar buys the chair itself; almost all of it buys the movement of the chair.
Sources
- Homepage
Ministry website · Joni and Friends · read 2026-09-18
- What we believe
Ministry website · Joni and Friends · read 2026-09-18
- Wheels for the World
Ministry website · Joni and Friends · read 2026-09-18
Describes the collection, prison restoration and volunteer distribution model, and what each recipient receives. Publishes no annual wheelchair count.
- Financial documents
Ministry website · Joni and Friends · read 2026-09-18
Posts audited statements and Form 990s for both Joni and Friends and the Joni and Friends Foundation, 2021 through 2025.
- FY2025 audited financial statements
Audited financial statements · Joni and Friends · 2025 · read 2026-09-18
Year ended 31 December 2025. Program services $54,365,860, management and administrative $6,031,130, fundraising $7,463,887. Also discloses the $1,870,483 restatement of donated wheelchair inventory.
- FY2025 Form 990
IRS Form 990 · Joni and Friends · 2025 · read 2026-09-18
Part III gives the three program lines and Part III line 4e gives total program service expenses of $38,759,679 — $15.6M below the audited figure for the same year.
- IRS filings for Joni and Friends, EIN 95-3402002
Third party · ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer · read 2026-09-18