Meet Dr. McKenzie Schneider
At Bridge to Independence, we're fortunate to have leaders who don't just believe in our mission — they've spent their careers living it. Dr. McKenzie Schneider is one of them. A Doctor of Occupational Therapy, licensed OTR/L, and MBA, she led our organization as Executive Director for three years and continues to serve on our Board of Directors today. But her impact reaches far beyond any single title.
Ask her how an occupational therapist ends up running nonprofits, sitting in fair hearings, and advising organizations across the country, and she'll tell you it never felt like a career change. It's been the same question asked in bigger and bigger rooms: what does this person, this family, actually need to live the life they want — and what is standing in the way?
A whole-person foundation
Dr. Schneider's training as an occupational therapist taught her to look at the whole person and their environment, not just a diagnosis. Her doctorate deepened that lens, and her MBA gave her the operational tools to make good intentions scale — budgets, staffing, compliance, and the unglamorous back-office machinery that determines whether help ever reaches a real family.
Clinically, much of her work sits with families in some of the most tender moments of their lives: parents navigating a disability that affects a mom or a new baby after birth, families rebuilding daily routines, and people learning coping skills to steady themselves through change. That work is intimate and one-on-one — and it kept surfacing the same systemic barriers, over and over, until she couldn't unsee them.
More than 60,000 families served, free of charge
Over the course of her career, Dr. Schneider has helped serve more than 60,000 families around the world at no cost to them. She's quick to say she never did it alone — it reflects a career spent building and leading programs, and giving her own time, in ways that put help directly into families' hands without a bill attached.
For a family already stretched thin by caregiving, medical costs, and lost income, "free" isn't a marketing word. It's often the difference between getting support and going without.
An advocate where it counts most
Some of Dr. Schneider's most important work happens in hearing rooms. She has served as a free advocate in disability waiver hearings, standing alongside families to argue that the funding and staffing a person is entitled to actually match the care they need.
The process can be disorienting: families are asked to prove, in bureaucratic terms, that their loved one's needs are real — while managing those needs at the same time. Too often, funding decisions and staffing allocations fall short of what a person genuinely requires to be safe and supported. Dr. Schneider shows up because expertise shouldn't be a luxury reserved for families who can afford to hire it, and because public reform in the waiver space doesn't happen only in legislatures. It happens one hearing at a time — and then in the policy patterns those hearings reveal.
It's slow, unglamorous work. But every appropriately funded plan is a person who gets to stay in their home, keep their caregiver, or finally receive the hours they were promised on paper.
Strengthening the whole field
Dr. Schneider also puts her energy behind the scenes with other organizations doing this work. She has consulted with more than 15 nonprofits nationwide to expand their reach and strengthen how accessibly they serve their communities.
Sometimes that means rethinking how a program is delivered so it actually reaches the people it was designed for. Sometimes it's the operational side — hiring, compliance, credentialing, funding strategy — the parts that quietly determine whether an organization can grow or stays stuck. As she often points out, accessibility isn't only a matter of ramps and captions. It's whether the right family can find you, qualify for your services, and get through your door without exhausting themselves in the process.
Why it matters to us
Everything Dr. Schneider does comes back to one belief: independence isn't something we hand to people — it's something we clear the path toward. The barriers are real, and they are also, largely, ours to fix.
That's the work Bridge to Independence commits to every day, and we're proud to do it alongside a leader who has never stopped asking the question that started it all: what does this family actually need? She intends to keep asking it in every room she can get into — and we're grateful she brings that same relentlessness to ours.
