The Break The Barriers organization is an organization that
is dedicated including anyone in any kind of activity. The
organization has a partnership with Fresno State. The Break
the Barrier is located on North Cedar Ave. and Teague.
Sam Yoder / The Collegian

Break The Barriers is an organization that grew up in a backyard in Fresno but is now known world wide thanks to the big heart of a Fresno State alumna.

“I had a prayer,”Deby Hergenrader, founder of Break The Barriers, said. “How are we going to show the world that all people belong together?”

Break The Barriers is an organization dedicated to including everyone in any kind of activity no matter his or her disability.

“We have a partnership with Fresno State,” Hergenrader said. “We work with the professors in special education. We are actually written into the curriculum for the liberal studies special education courses.”

Leila Alawad, 21, is a senior at Fresno State who currently has an internship with Break The Barriers. She teaches a reading lab to kids aged anywhere from 6 years old to 18 years old who need speech therapy.

“I would like to be a speech therapist and this internship will help me do that,” Alawad said.

Alawad works with the kids twice a week along with another student intern from the speech pathology department at Fresno State. She grew up in Fresno but was not familiar with Break The Barriers until this internship.

“I had no idea it existed,” Alawad said. “Deby told me everything about Break The Barriers when I got there.”

Hergenrader is a Fresno State alumna who started this organization in her backyard in 1983. It was her sister, Kathy Mullen, who gave her the drive to start an organization based on the principles of including everyone in all activities.

Mullen, 50, was born with Down syndrome but did not let that stop her from wanting to compete.

“My parents would try to get my brother, my sister and I signed up for recreational sports,” Hergenrader said. “When we’d go people would say to my parents that we can take the two older children but we don’t work with those kinds of people and they would point to my sister.”

Now, 28 years later, thanks to the support of her husband Steve Hergenrader and many donations from others, Break The Barriers has a 32,000 square-foot facility teaching everything from gymnastics to taekwondo, and they even have classes for speech therapy.

Now the world knows about Break The Barriers. Jared Schmidt, 30, is a world champion Special Olympics athlete in gymnastics and snow skiing who now works for Break The Barriers. He has traveled all over the world during the years he’s spent with the organization.

“We went to Romania twice and after that we went to China,” Schmidt said. “After that we went to South Africa and the last one was the Dominican Republic.”

Government officials from these countries and others contact Break The Barriers and ask them to come and perform in their country.

“The director from China said to me that you and your husband may have started this program because of your sister, but this performing team is an international influence,” Hergenrader said.

This type of worldwide recognition has been made possible from countless donations and support from philanthropists such as Linda Smittcamp, a Fresno State alumna and Break The Barriers board member.

Smittcamp said her and her family choose non-profits to contribute to and she had friends who had children in the programs at Break The Barriers, which is how she learned about the organization.

A benefit dinner is put on every year by board members to raise funds for the organization.

“Our goal is to raise funds for scholarships for the kids who cannot afford to pay for it,” Smittcamp said.

She also said they try to get an anonymous donation from supporters called “Secret Pocket” which pays for one child to attend classes of their choice for the entire year.

Break The Barriers received a grant from the U.S. Department of Education for a projector and surround sound speakers to educate the classes from Fresno State who go to Break The Barriers to learn about inclusion.

“We are for everybody,” Hergenrader said. “This program is for you and for me and it’s for the ones in a wheelchair, the ones that can see and can’t see. It’s for everybody.

“We work with various abilities,” she continued. “We all have abilities and disabilities. We all have our own handicaps.”