It was Mark Raymond, Jr.’s own experience with the healthcare system that inspired him to make changes for the disabled community in New Orleans.
Raymond, now 33, was 27 when he dove off a friend’s boat and shattered the fifth vertebra in his neck. Prior to his accident, he had worked as a broadcast engineer in the sports field.
Through navigating his stay in the ICU and then inpatient therapy, he learned firsthand how underserved the disabled community was. Once he was discharged from the hospital, it took him two months to get into an outpatient therapy program because there was a waiting list. When he got in, it was only for one or two days per week.
“It was a very inefficient process, and it led to a lot of isolation and depression for me,” says Raymond. “While I was simultaneously dealing with my own grief, not having a community to lean on in a way that was substantive and supportive was hard.”
After his allotted outpatient sessions ended, Raymond decided to go to an activity-based fitness center in California called SciFit, at his own expense.
“They challenged how my body could recover from a spinal cord injury,” says Raymond. “In the three months, I spent there, I felt stronger and like I was gaining more than in the whole year I’d spent in physical and occupational therapy previously.”
The center was very costly, but it was worth it in that it gave Raymond the idea of starting an organization that could provide the same types of services for people in New Orleans with spinal cord injuries and other debilitating conditions. He started to network and organize events so he could raise seed money to get the organization off the ground.