This Boise campus aims to ‘turn stigma into badge of honor’ for vets, challenged athletes
In five years working with Mission43, Bryan Madden became inspired.
Madden is the director of Mission43, an initiative of the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation to provide veterans and military spouses with opportunities in education, employment and engagement. The group also overlaps frequently with the Challenged Athletes Foundation of Idaho, which has been operating for three years.
As both groups worked with similar populations, Madden and those around him started to dream big.
“Oftentimes we just don’t think that big, but the leadership here thinks that way,” Madden said in an interview. “What if we did do something incredible like this? What would that look like?”
What it looks like is a 50,000-square-foot building on a 7-acre property to house headquarters for both Mission43 and the Challenged Athletes Foundation of Idaho next to Marianne Williams Park and the Boise River.
The groundbreaking for the Idaho Outdoor Fieldhouse is scheduled for Thursday, Veterans Day. The campus is planned to open in the summer of 2023. The foundation is paying for the entire project.
Plans as of now call for meeting space, an aquatic center, a fitness area, a multipurpose gymnasium and a hyperbaric medicine center. Outside, there are plans for challenge courses, bouldering walls and equipment storage. There also may be short-term residential housing for people who visit to train.
Roger Quarles, executive director of the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation, said in an interview that the center will have “an Idaho flavor” designed for people to practice sports that Idaho’s outdoors offers. He listed fly fishing, mountain biking, wheelchair paddle-boarding, and archery as examples. The location will have access to the river and Greenbelt.
Since veterans and adaptive athletes may be hesitant to try these sports on their own, Quarles explained that there’s a significant benefit of gathering them together in a safe environment.
“How do you turn a stigma into a badge of honor?” Quarles said. “That’s what we’re trying to do with our CAF athletes and our Mission43 members.”
Quarles said there’s nothing like this in the Northwest. The future center could help train Paralympic athletes, too. The Paralympics welcomes people with amputations, cerebral palsy, intellectual disability, visually impairments, spinal injuries and other disabilities. Unlike Special Olympics, the Paralympics have a strict qualification process. Quarles compared the future center for Paralympic athletes to the way Olympic athletes visit Park City, Utah, to train.
Madden grew up in a military family, graduated from the U.S. Military Academy and was an active-duty Army officer. He transitioned to the Idaho Air National Guard and remains an officer in the Air Force while working for Mission43.
Similarly, Madden said he’s “never seen anything like this” around the country. If he was choosing where to move after serving in the military, Madden said a venue like the Idaho Outdoor Fieldhouse would make it an easy decision.
“There’s going to be a massive influx of people who come here because of that,” Madden said.
Madden estimates that about 50,000 veterans and military spouses have moved to Idaho in the past 20 years, and there are roughly 200,000 people with physical disabilities in the state. The new headquarters would help Madden and Quarles reach as many of them as possible.
Mission43 has plans to host at least 65 events next year, including running and cycling clubs, happy hours, coffee hours and employment workshops. In the past five years, Mission43 has helped 1,200 veterans and spouses find employment in Idaho with an average starting salary of $63,000, Madden said.
“There is so much potential in that group between the person who served and the military spouse. There’s so much focus, and there’s a draw to the victim side of the military,” Madden said. “Our country and Idaho should be looking to that audience and saying, ‘OK, we appreciate your service, but there’s a lot more for you to do and to accomplish in our state. What is that going to be?’ The field house is a physical place where you can see that.”
Until this point, though, everything has been conceptual. With construction beginning, Madden feels the project is much more real.
Quarles described both Mission43 and the Challenged Athletes Foundation of Idaho as inspirational. And now the two groups are close to operating side by side.
“I think the magic will really happen when those two groups come together under one roof on one campus right here in our own backyard in Boise,” Quarles said. “It will put Boise on the map in a whole ‘nother context.”
The groundbreaking ceremony is scheduled for 10 a.m. Thursday at 3191 E. Barber Valley Road in Boise. In addition to Mission43 and CAF-Idaho leaders and members, Idaho Gov. Brad Little and Boise Mayor Lauren McLean are expected to attend.
