Kathy Freund was still reeling from the early death of her husband when her 3-year-old son was run over by a car. The elderly driver said he hadn’t seen the child, who miraculously survived the accident.
    
Freund saw a much larger problem than her son’s injuries: elders needed to be able to get around and some of them were a danger to others when they drove cars. She left her work as a real estate broker and went to graduate school to study ways older people whose reflexes, muscle control or eyesight were failing could maintain their mobility without taking the wheel of a car.
     
Money was tight, with only her late husband’s small insurance policy to cover expenses, but Freund began going to conferences on aging to present her findings. By the time she earned her masters, she had devised a three-part plan for what she named the Independent Transportation Network. ITN would provide elders with workable transportation alternatives, revise public policy on elder drivers, and educate the public about the issue. ITN would provide volunteer drivers who would pick seniors up, deliver them wherever they wanted to go and return them safely home.
    
Named by the Maine legislature to head a task force on aging drivers, Freund found herself paying all the task force’s expenses; there was no operating budget. Despite her careful presentations at national meetings on gerontology and on transportation issues, newspapers reported her work as an attack on the rights of older drivers. Although Freund made it very clear that she wasn’t saying elders should be trapped in their homes, many of them were taking her work to mean just that. She was beseiged by angry seniors who sent her furious letters, left insulting messages on her answering machine and verbally attacked her in public.
    
The uproar cost Freund her job as a transportation planner; her boss said she could either be an activist or a planner. She chose activist, continuing her work on ITN. A New York Times column that presented her plan accurately brought in inquiries and support from across the country. “I think this issue touches every home in the United States,” Freund says.
    
ITN today is a much-copied national model that matches volunteer drivers and elders, getting them where they need to go, keeping the roads safe—and forging new friendships. It hasn’t been easy getting ITN in place, but Kathy Freund says, “When a task that you feel this strongly about comes along, it feels like it’s chosen you more than you’ve chosen it.”