Going against the advice of Vocational Rehabilitation, David Patterson quit his job, sold most of his belongings and entered Volunteers of America as an unpaid resident manager in 1991.
During his tenure at the University at Buffalo, he founded a number of programs to benefit Native American students, most notably the Native American Center for Wellness Research (for which he was director for five years), the Wolf-Fire scholarship,[REF][REF] and a Native American living and learning community [REF].