LiberNovo and Special Olympics New York: The Desks Behind the Games Jorden Hebenton September 2, 2026 The chairs arrived flat-packed. The staff built them. Special Olympics New York is the largest Special Olympics program in the United States. More than 42,000 athletes and Unified partners, every region of the state, and not one of them pays a cent to take part. That last part is the one worth sitting with. Every program the organization runs is free to athletes, their families, and their caregivers. No registration fee, no equipment bill, no travel invoice at the end of a season. Free is the promise, and free is expensive. Somebody has to cover it, organize it, and keep covering it, year after year, for tens of thousands of people. That somebody works at a desk. The Part Nobody Photographs The pictures that come out of Special Olympics are the ones you would expect: a finish line, a medal, a teammate pulling someone into a hug. They should be. That is the point of the whole thing. But between those photographs there is a quieter kind of work, and it happens in offices. Venues get booked. Volunteers get recruited, screened, scheduled, and thanked. Grant applications get written, then rewritten. Buses get arranged. Schools get called back. Special Olympics New York works with around 250 schools across the state on Unified Sports, where students with and without intellectual disabilities compete on the same team, and every one of those partnerships is somebody's inbox. None of that is glamorous, and almost none of it gets seen. It is also the reason the athlete at the starting line got there at no cost to their family. One of the desks the chairs were sent for. What We Sent Moving the finished chairs to where they were needed. We sent LiberNovo Omni chairs to three of their offices: the Albany headquarters, the New York City office, and the Long Island office. The staff assembled them themselves, in a conference room, on a workday. That is the whole of it. It is a small thing next to what they do, and a chair lasts, which is why it seemed worth sending. Why a Chair, Specifically We spend most of our time thinking about people who sit for a living, and about what a long day does to a body that is not being supported through it. Our chairs are built to keep moving with the person in them, because the healthiest way to sit is not one perfect position held for eight hours; it is a body that changes position often and stays supported through all of it. Nonprofit staff are exactly the group that tends to get skipped when that thinking gets applied. Budgets go where the mission is, as they should. Furniture is the last line item, and the chair someone inherited in 2015 stays in service for another decade. When we looked at where a chair could matter most, the office nobody is decorating seemed like a reasonable answer. Where This Goes The team at Special Olympics New York. We would like this to be more than a one-time delivery. That part is early, and it is on us to earn. Special Olympics has been running since 1968, when Eunice Kennedy Shriver opened the first games at Soldier Field in Chicago with a thousand athletes. It grew into one of the largest inclusion movements in the world, largely on the work of people who do not get named. If you have a few hours to spare, Special Olympics New York needs volunteers more than it needs anything we make. Get involved with Special Olympics New York → Back to blog Share on Facebook Opens in a new window. Tweet on Twitter Opens in a new window.