July 1, 2024
Spinal Cord Injury: So Hot Right Now!
Quinn Brett
Spinal Cord Injury is so hot right now!
There are over 300,000 people in the United States living with a spinal cord injury, with roughly 18,000 new injuries a year.
U2FP has 2,500 subscribers to our newsletter, with roughly 62 monthly donors. I am aiming to raise our monthly donor-ship by another 40 of you lovely people by the end of 2024. So far this year, we’ve added 9 new monthly donors.
Doing some quick math, that means right now, only 2 percent of you receiving these emails are monthly donors. Thank you to everyone who has donated, either monthly, at the end of the year, or just sporadically. Monthly donors, though, are important to our strategic long term planning. It's a regular and reliable source of support we can count on to keep building our initiatives which all contribute to functional recovery research.
Your donations directly impact the rate, pace and gravity of our efforts by and for the SCI community. To date, this includes:
- Our Cure Advocacy Network has passed nearly $40M in SCI Research Grant funding in four states!!!! This is a time consuming but incredibly fruitful effort. Our own SCI community helps write these bills and continues to oversee where the money is distributed as Advisory board members.
- Our Lab Rats initiative has placed 24 SCI consultants in 11 research labs, redirecting the science and closing the gap between lived experiences and lab direction.
- U2FP coordinated the funding and design of a combination research study using NervGen’s peptide NVG-291 and epidural stimulation to be tested on pigs, an animal model that promises much higher clinical relevance than rodents. We’ll be hearing details on how it’s going at our Symposium this fall!
- U2FP’s CureCast podcast reaches tens of thousands of listeners in the SCI and Scientific community every year. As a person with an SCI, it was a lifeline for me. And it’s become required listening for many SCI graduate students.
I am gonna keep asking for your help, we need it. We can’t do this work without it! I know some of you can muster $50 (or more) a month. I also know that many of you can’t - how this injury destroys your finances and ability to work is another part of the system we need to cure. But we have many donors at the $10 or $25 a month level!
Truly, your donation will do two things— 1) keep you engaged and curious as an ally in our work and 2) make a lasting impact on SCI lives. For example, your dollars fuel our staff and volunteer visits with legislatures, helping us pass the bills that give state funding to the researchers. And the research our bills have funded have now provided more than 200 people with an SCI receive meaningful interventions!
2024 Science & Advocacy Symposium Sponsors
