Potomac resident Josh Basile and Brittany Martin, a Chinese teacher and the Varsity Rugby head coach at Landon School, have co-founded a new website, www.SPINALpedia.com.
The site is a video-sharing mentor network for people with paralysis and their families and friends. Launched at the beginning of 2012, SPINALpedia already has thousands of videos posted to the site.
SPINALpedia’s mission and vision is “to bridge the gap between an able-bodied life and a healthy, productive life with paralysis both for the people injured as well as their families and friends. We envision a society where people with paralysis are no longer isolated and can return to being active members of society. In order to realize that goal, we need to unite our community and find strength in the power of our experiences.”
Basile and Martin met in the summer of 2007 and realized that they shared the same mission to improve the quality of life for people with paralysis. Basile suffered a spinal cord injury in 2004. Martin’s father suffered a spinal cord injury when she was 12. Basile and Martin recognized the difficulty many people experience when trying to find useful information to adapt one's life, and came together to create SPINALpedia and bring the most useful resources to the paralysis community.