Jonathan Dietz’s support for spinal cord injury research began with a simple round of golf.
He happily grabbed his clubs when he was invited to play in the Alan T Brown Foundation Golf Classic more than thirty years ago.
Alan Brown was a high school friend who had been paralyzed in an accident in 1988. Paralysis was not new to Jonathan. He also graduated high school and college with Daniel Heumann, who was paralyzed in a car accident in 1985, two weeks before he was to begin his freshman year at Syracuse University.
The devastating injuries prompted a surge of support from the close-knit community that surrounded the family. When Alan and his parents launched the Foundation to help fund research, young classmates like Dietz were early boosters.
“We didn’t have the means at that time, but we contributed what we could,” Dietz says. “We chose his cause.”
Returning to play in Alan’s tournament year after year, Dietz saw the outsized impact Alan and his family were having on other community members affected by spinal cord injury.
“Alan connected people with people. He put them in touch with the right doctors and provided them with the support early on that they needed so they could manage their injuries and not give up on themselves. For a lot of these people, it was life changing,” Dietz says.
Inspired by their passion, Dietz, now a public insurance adjuster and consultant, is one of the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation’s most dedicated supporters. (The Alan T Brown Foundation became a fundraising arm of the Reeve Foundation in 2019.)
This December, as part of the Reeve Foundation’s year-end campaign, Dietz hopes to double his impact with a matching donation of $30,000.