July 1, 2026

Disability Pride Month & U2FP

Quinn Brett

July is Disability Pride Month. And this July 26th will mark 36 years since the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed on the South Lawn of the White House. That day President George H.W. Bush looked out at a crowd of wheelchair users, blind advocates, deaf organizers, and people who had literally crawled up the steps of the Capitol three months earlier to make it happen, and said: "Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down."
 

Source: obamawhitehouse.archives.gov

36 years later that wall is still in the process of coming down. Slowly. With a lot of pushing from individuals and organizations. U2FP is one of those organizations working to fully realize the promise the ADA made 36 years ago. 

What U2FP does – in case you need the reminder – is grassroots spinal cord injury advocacy and support for smart, community-driven functional recovery research. We are the people in the community: the wheelies, the caregivers, the researchers, the able-bodied allies who have decided that waiting around for functional recovery and a cure isn’t good enough. We help the SCI community and the greater world understand the nuance of spinal cord injury while also amplifying our educated voices about how research funding is disproportionate to our population's size and heterogeneity (every SCI a snowflake!). U2FP helps guide research priorities to align with the community’s needs and works to ensure the recovery efforts being funded greatly improve our quality of life and longevity. 
 

Above: This graph was a key illustration for our Roll on the Capital earlier this year. It visualizes the research investment within the NIH, relative to the “condition/disease burden” of rare neurological conditions. The assumption is that the taxpayer should be investing in conditions or disease research relative to the “burden” of living with that condition based on the Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs). The current NIH investment in research for spinal cord injury is disproportionately low compared to its “burden” on the individual in terms of quality of life and the taxpayer in terms of healthcare and opportunity costs.

Here's what U2FP’s work helped deliver recently: $33 million! 

That's how much federal funding we helped restore after the government eliminated the Department of Defense’s Spinal Cord Injury Research Program (SCIRP) at the beginning of 2025. For the rest of that year, we rallied our community and organized with other SCI orgs, calling, writing and traveling to congressional members' offices in Washington D.C. In February of 2026, over 100 of us showed up in D.C. to propose expanding SCI funding to meet the true cost of this injury. We raised our voice and united our community for a whole year, and we ultimately won. That same month, the federal government restored the $33 million dollars it had cut, putting nearly all of that money back into the pipeline for SCI research. That number matters.

We've also helped push research milestones in epidural stimulation, regeneration, and neuroprotection by passing state legislation that funds smart research projects — over $50 million across four different states. Actual people with spinal cord injuries have been involved in clinical trials because of this increase in funding. That means innovative research is finally getting the funding it needs for proof of concept and follow-up studies — to move out of the lab and into translation, into the humans actually living with this injury.
 

Triple Threat! Laura Grabowski (C6/7) taking steps on a treadmill with her trainer Mica. They are using a stimulator that U2FP’s legislative advocacy made possible. Laura has seen improved function with her stimulator and is an SCI Consultant for U2FP as well as a monthly donor!

That's the whole point. Not research for research's sake. Research that reaches us. None of these accomplishments would have been possible without our longtime monthly donors.

Why are monthly donors such a big deal? When you give monthly…$10, $20, $33, $50 a month (or more!), you give U2FP the ability to plan smarter. It allows us to commit to a multi-year education and advocacy effort without sweating whether we'll be able to keep the lights on. Fundraising events and individual donations are our main sources of support for this important advocacy work, as grants typically do not support legislative work. We are grateful for one-time gifts but monthly gifts are the floor we stand on.

In honor of the $33 million we succeeded in restoring, we are looking at you to become one of 33 new monthly donors this month – because we are proud of our work, that number means something and my favorite number is also 33 – Scottie Pippen, anyone?! :)