About Us

Focus

Empower SCI is a residential program catered to individuals who have had an injury to their spinal cord. The program focuses on peer mentoring, rehabilitation counseling, and informal knowledge-sharing between individuals who are going through similar experiences and challenges in addition to formal physical therapy, occupational therapy, and recreational therapy. The yearly program consists of a combination of individual and group therapy sessions. Each program caters to the unique needs of the client. The Empower SCI team utilizes client-developed goals to maximize the client’s ability to lead a happier, more meaningful, and more independent life. Empower SCI’s focus is to allow individuals with spinal cord injuries the opportunity to participate in successful rehabilitation at a time in their lives where they are motivated, healed (both mentally and orthopedically), and have the potential to succeed. Empower SCI also runs wheelchair skills courses throughout the United States.

History And Purpose

Empower Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) fills a gap in the current rehabilitation model. Traditionally, rehabilitation ceases only a few months after injury. Often this period is fraught with medical co-morbidities, emotional despair, and focus on survival; this makes it difficult to work toward a purposeful future. Empower SCI’s Summer Residential Rehabilitation Program impacts individuals who are at least one-year post-injury when rehabilitation benefits have been exhausted and provide them the tools to return to a meaningful life.

Over the past 50 years, rehabilitation services have drastically decreased for individuals who have sustained a spinal cord injury. Days hospitalized in the acute care unit have declined from 24 days in the 1970s to 11 days in 2010; days in rehabilitation units have declined from 98 to 36 days. The shorter length of stays, and numerous complicating factors during inpatient rehabilitation, can negatively impact an individual’s traditional in-patient rehabilitation experience. Empower SCI’s Summer Residential Rehabilitation Programs provides a unique rehabilitation experience offered over 1 year following an injury at a time when the individual is ready to capitalize on change. In traditional rehabilitation, the individual learns survival strategies needed for the transition to home; at Empower SCI, individuals are ready to expand their knowledge and seek out ways to overcome the barriers to living a happy, meaningful life.

The three founders of Empower SCI, Carrie Callahan, Jessica Goodine, and Elizabeth Lima Remillard met in 2010 and began to lay the groundwork for Empower SCI soon after. The program began to take shape, and Empower SCI incorporated and quickly hosted a successful pilot program in July of 2012 at Stony Brook University in NY. The Stony Brook program has since established itself as Empower’s flagship program. The summer of 2019 marked another milestone, with the launch of the Missoula, Montana-based summer program at the University of Montana. Since the summer of 2012, Empower has served over 100 individuals with spinal cord injuries and has thrived through the service of over 500 volunteers.

Since 2022, Empower SCI has broadens it’s impact and expanded it’s continuum into 4 Pillars of Programming, which are each described below.