The Rick Hansen Foundation and Spinal Cord Research
by author Ann-Marie Metten

Rick Hansen and the Rick Hansen Foundation have raised more than $178 million for spinal cord injury-related programs and quality-of-life initiatives during the past 20 years, beginning with the amazing $26 million raised through the 26,000-mile Man In Motion World Tour-that's $1,000 per mile travelled.

That initial funding established the Rick Hansen Legacy Fund, seed money for today's Rick Hansen Foundation, which sets out two broad mandates:

• fund spinal cord research
• enhance the quality of life for people with spinal cord injuries

Twenty years after the 1985 to 1987 tour, we can mark the progress made in both areas.

Measurable Advances

Certainly, we see progress in the other mandate of the Rick Hansen Foundation: creating more accessible and inclusive communities for people with a spinal cord injury. Nevertheless, Hansen relates an experience last summer at a recently designed sports facility, where he was watching his daughter's soccer game but wanted to get out of the sun. All the able-bodied parents headed to the stands but that wasn't an option for Hansen because the stands hadn't been designed to accommodate a wheelchair. His only choice was to head to the central building, but found no way past the flight of stairs into the structure.

"So someone wasn't thinking," said Hansen. "It means there's more work to be done. It's not a condemnation. It's just a reality of the magnitude of the challenges that we face."

Even after 20 years of awareness-raising work on the part of the Rick Hansen Foundation and other groups like it, people with disabilities still need to ask for access to public facilities.

Hansen has never hesitated to challenge our perceptions about what is possible for people with disabilities. One of his major goals has been to push boundaries and remove obstacles that diminish quality of life for people with disabilities.

"Every year, more and more people find barriers removed because we've never, ever given up," Hansen said.

The Way It Was

Looking back at 1985 and the days just before he rolled south out of Vancouver to launch the Man In Motion World Tour, Hansen recalls the utter inaccessibility of some of the public buildings he needed to enter. The day before the launch, he had been honoured at the University of British Columbia Faculty Club, but because the building had no wheelchair access, he had to travel between floors while crammed into the kitchen's dumbwaiter. He had been hauled to the wrong floor and then left there with the door shut and no one waiting to let him out. Finally he managed to work the door open just as his crew arrived and stuffed him back in the dumbwaiter to hoist him one floor higher to the celebration event. "Not exactly a sweeping entrance," Hansen reminisces.

Today, most communities across Canada have at least moderate levels of accessibility-curb cuts, accessible entrances, public washrooms, elevators, and even hotel rooms. People with spinal cord injury can enjoy restaurants, movie theatres, and other cultural experiences, without having to enter through the kitchen or back door. Internationally, the Great Wall of China-Hansen's greatest challenge during the Man In Motion World Tour-now has an accessible washroom available to visitors.

Observable Advances in Research

At the time of the Tour, researchers thought a cure was not possible. During the past 20 years, we have learned that the spinal cord can regrow and that with surgical, rehabilitation, and community interventions, people are acquiring greater degrees of mobility and inclusion than at any other time in history.

Since 1986, spinal cord injury has become a research field in its own right. Twenty years ago just a few Canadian researchers were looking at cord injury and many of them also focused on other neurological areas. Now more than 300 researchers in BC alone and hundreds more across Canada conduct research that is ranked among the best in the world.

Twenty or 30 years ago, a person with a spinal cord injury might regain 30 percent mobility. Today, people might regain 70 percent or more. It depends on the situation, treatment, and type of injury.

Ann-Marie Metten, like many Canadians, vividly remembers Rick Hansen’s Man In Motion World Tour and is pleased to have been able to meet and write about her long-respected hero.

Source: alive Web Exclusive, May 2007