WheelCare.Health is the passion project of Kirk Knestis PhD, leveraging a combination of mechanical skills he gained in motorsports, empathy informed by experiences as an educator and social program evaluator, and business expertise developed collectively across other previous endeavors.

Even before completing his bachelor’s degree in Industrial Design, Kirk Knestis was an entrepreneur, starting a small design and marketing firm for clients in auto racing—an interest he maintained through his retirement from motorsports competition at the end of the 2024 racing season.

He sold the assets of that first company to help finance a Master in Teaching degree and career change to K-12 classroom education, motivated in large part by his long involvement as a coach in youth skiing and gymnastics programs.

As a Grade 7-9 educator, Kirk developed and taught science, art, and career and technology education courses. He also served on multiple school- and district-level planning and professional development teams—experiences from which he developed a particular interest in the assessment and evaluation of both students and teachers.

He left classroom teaching after six years for opportunities in postsecondary education, transitioning through a role managing a master’s degree program for inservice teachers to ultimately earn a PhD in Education Policy and Evaluation. This terminal degree set up the now “Dr. K.” for five years as an education and social services program evaluation specialist, first with a university center, then with a regional nonprofit lab.

In 2009, he accepted a position managing what would grow to be a 12-person evaluation firm in central New York State, first as Director of Research and Evaluation, then as CEO. He left that position in 2018 to open his own social science research consultancy near Washington, DC. That company (Evaluand LLC) is still in operation but is scaling back as Kirk bootstraps startup of his new nonprofit effort.