Board Member Spotlight: Alex Blaszczuk

In early 2012, an Information Specialist at the National Paralysis Resource Center (NPRC) learned about a young woman who’d recently been paralyzed in a car accident.

He quickly reached out to introduce the NPRC and offer help.

The story was about an upcoming fundraiser for a young woman who’d recently been paralyzed in a car accident. The NPRC staffer found the woman’s contact information and quickly reached out.

When the email appeared in her inbox, Alex Blaszczuk was momentarily confused. Though she knew of Christopher Reeve, the work of the NPRC was not yet on her radar. But the moment she began clicking through its vast digital library a lightbulb went off.

“It was very clear that this was going to be something useful,” she says.

Just three months earlier, Blaszczuk had been a second-year student at Columbia Law School with a prestigious internship in London lined up for the following summer. She lived in Soho, loved her studies and counted friends across the city. Everything seemed to be falling into place.

But that October, on her way upstate for a quick camping trip, Blaszczuk sustained a C5-C6 spinal cord injury when the car she was riding in was struck from behind. She left New York to recover near her family in Chicago. On the day she was discharged from rehabilitation, Blaszczuk immediately began plotting a speedy return to the city and the life she’d been building.

“Everyone responds to this kind of event differently, and I think a lot of what got me through those initial months was being very, very focused,” she says.

Blaszczuk chronicled her progress on a detailed chart, tracking not only her physical health, but the logistics she needed to master to reach her goals and regain independence. The NPRC’s comprehensive library became the place she went to for answers: How do you do a bowel program at home? How do you prevent pressure wounds? What is autonomic dysreflexia? Its booklets and factsheets helped her better understand the injury and also educate the care assistants who would become critical to her life.

“I went back to the website many times,” she says. “It was such an overwhelming time, and it was so helpful to have those resources as yet another piece of the puzzle.”

Her determination paid off: Blaszczuk was back at Columbia that fall, crisscrossing the city in an adaptive minivan and hosting weekly gatherings in her apartment near campus. Over the next decade, Blaszczuk graduated, passed the bar exam and joined Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom as an associate in Mergers and Acquisitions. She eventually moved back downtown and became a mediator at the New York Peace Institute.

But even as her life unfolded, the NPRC’s impact lingered. While rehabilitating in Chicago, Blaszczuk had met Reeve Foundation Board member Pat Volland by chance; back in New York, the two became good friends. Over the years, Volland’s regular updates about the foundation and the scope of its work increasingly captured Blaszczuk’s attention. When the pandemic hit, she realized she wanted to be part of that wider world.

“During and after the lockdowns, it became much more important for me to find a place where I could consistently support the disability community,” she says. “And it was Pat who said that maybe the way forward was the board.”

In 2023 , Blaszczuk joined the Reeve Foundation Board of Directors, closing a circle that began with an out-of-the-blue email that arrived in her life at exactly the moment she needed it. With Volland, she now co-chairs the Quality-of-Life Committee and works to strengthen resources that encourage the kind of independence that fueled her own recovery. She also hopes to help spotlight the critical connection between care and cure and build a new generation of support for the extraordinary outreach efforts at the heart of Reeve’s mission.

"The kind of proactive engagement Reeve does is really inspiring,” Blaszczuk says, adding, “It’s a certain approach of being in the world and trying to change it. Not just responding to a need but finding the need – and finding the people who need assistance. And that, I think, speaks to how serious the people at Reeve are about making this organization so remarkable.”