Keeping Dreams Alive

When P.K. Beville, a Georgia psychologist, was trying to solve behavioral problems among nursing-home patients, she was struck by a recurring phenomenon: Most had lost their ability to imagine anything beyond the day-to-day life they had come to know.

So in 1997, Ms. Beville created Second Wind Dreams to encourage the elderly to hold on to their ambitions and desires. Through its work, the charity, in Alpharetta, Ga., has helped fulfill around 4,000 wishes — currently at an average of three a day.

For some, the requests are heartbreakingly simple — a cup holder for a wheelchair or a teddy bear to hold, for example. Other wishes have been logistically or emotionally complex — like reuniting two sisters who live on opposite coasts or helping someone who never graduated from college obtain a degree. In most cases, participants just want to have fun: The charity has arranged rides in a hot-air balloon and on a motorcycle to fulfill fantasies.

The charity encourages homes for the elderly to join the organization for $100 a year, and so far it has enlisted more than 480 facilities throughout the United States and Canada. In return, the group provides training to nursing-home workers in how to identify residents’ dreams, encourage family participation in fulfilling them, and find local volunteers who can donate services or time to make the wishes happen. While Second Wind Dreams helps meet some of the most challenging requests, staff members at nursing homes usually take responsibility for seeing that dreams become reality.

Second Wind Dreams is now starting its first chapter, in St. Petersburg, Fla. Its $200,000 annual budget comes mainly from individuals and nursing-home facilities. The organization’s reach has extended even to India, where a man read about the charity’s work online and has since been fulfilling wishes of elderly people in that country.

Here, Vi Heimlich, a former amateur ballerina who has Alzheimer’s disease and difficulty walking, fulfills her dream of dancing once again by joining a rehearsal of the Texas Ballet Theater.