For more than a quarter-century, P-I readers have donated generously to the newspaper's annual Readers Care Fund drive, generating more than $5.4 million for local charities. Today we feature another of the seven charities that will benefit from this year's drive.

Transistor radios were the iPods of their day, and, like a lot of kids, Darcy Doyle-Hupf used to slip one in her pocket and take it everywhere.

She wasn't grooving to the Top 40, she was emulating her best friend, a second-grader who wore cool-looking ear buds wired to a hearing-aid transmitter.

		Meryl Schenker / P-I
	In 1991, Darcy Doyle-Hupf, left, with Chris Harkins, founded Northwest's Child, a small, growing network that ensures some of the city's most disabled young people can live at home with loving parents.

"Most kids play secret agent or cowboys and Indians," she said. "I played that I was deaf."

Doyle-Hupf is 47 now and has left her Tri-Cities childhood far behind -- but not her passion to help people with special needs.

Thanks to her pioneering efforts, some of the city's most severely disabled young people enjoy the fundamental right of continuing to live at home with loving parents, who might otherwise be financially pressed to relinquish them to the state.

Doyle-Hupf is the soul of Northwest's Child, a network of extended-day programs for children and young adults with serious disabilities.

It's one of seven agencies supported by this season's P-I Readers Care Fund.

The vibe at Northwest's Child is homelike and upbeat, thanks to a highly trained staff that tries to nurture the potential of young people who face some of life's steepest hurdles.

"There are kids (here) that need constant supervision, constant care," Doyle-Hupf said. "We have 14- to 18-year-olds who continue to need to be hand-fed or diapered and transitioned to their chairs."

But the emphasis is on what students can do -- and they do plenty. They take field trips, deliver a community newspaper, bake brownies and lead as rich a life as possible while their parents are at work, earning the paychecks that keep the family intact.

Last month Northwest's Child opened its fourth site -- an adult program in Kenmore. It also runs an adult program in Seattle and school-age programs in Seattle and Lynnwood.

Brian Osborn, a program teacher and assistant director, said Doyle-Hupf's savvy grasp of the special-services maze has been a godsend for countless families in crisis.

"For every one family enrolled in our program," Osborn said, "there's probably 40 or 50 she has helped through e-mails. We get phone calls every week."

Doyle-Hupf, a sandy-haired, blue-jeaned dynamo, has three young-adult children, an adopted 8-year-old son and a medically fragile foster daughter, Bryanna.

It's a lot to handle, but Doyle-Hupf relishes her whirlwind life.

"It is so much fun," she said. "I just call it glorious chaos."

But ask her about the unmet needs of the stressed-out families she serves, and she gets steamed. She said there was nothing like Northwest's Child when she created the program in 1991 -- and there still isn't. Even now, she needs the state's case-by-case OK to enroll students over age 12, the usual child care age limit.

Doyle-Hupf was a home day care provider in the late 1980s when she learned how stark the landscape was: A severely autistic boy in her care had turned 13 and needed a safer placement -- but no services could be located. The boy's mother finally lost hope and relinquished custody to the state.

Angry that the system had failed, Doyle-Hupf set out to knit a new safety net for families whose aging children had nowhere to turn. "When people discover this is a problem, they're shocked," she said. "Everyone thinks it's being taken care of."

Doyle-Hupf, who has a special-education teaching degree, has been working in the field of disabilities since her teens, when she was a student aide for a severely autistic, developmentally disabled preschooler.

Seemingly, no one expected much from either of them, yet it was that untrained teen who finally got through to the child and gave her her first experience of language -- the finger sign for milk.

"It was almost like my Helen Keller moment," said Doyle-Hupf, who counts "The Miracle Worker" as her favorite movie.

Today she uses that film in staff training -- not to glorify the life-changing role of teachers, but to stress that disability is no excuse to live in a netherworld of low expectations.

"I've never allowed myself to become a victim to the world," Doyle-Hupf said, "and that's basically how I've raised my kids: Be the example, be the answer.

"Life is not about whether you're given a fair shake; it's what you do with what you have."

Other non-profit groups that benefit from the P-I Readers Care Fund are the Family & Adult Service Center, the Forgotten Children's Fund, The Little Bit Therapeutic Riding Center, New Futures, Powerful Voices and Rise n' Shine.

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