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| First Person: Point of View |
Superwoman
Dana Reeve
10/01/2005
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Joan Irvine Smith [a
philanthropist who is the great-granddaughter of California pioneer James
Irvine] is not on our board, but after Chris was injured, she saw him
interviewed on television. He was in the rehab center at the Kessler Institute,
and they set up a room with a phone for all the calls we were getting—literally
everyone from people who said they had a cure and healers to families and
well-wishers. A dear friend, Michael, handled the messages, and he showed us one
that said, “Mrs. Smith, California, wants to give you $1 million.” We put her in
the kooks pile at first. She loves it that she was in the kooks pile. But
Michael called her back, and sure enough, she’s such a horsewoman, she said,
“Chris didn’t say anything bad about his horse, so I want to give you a million
dollars.” She used it to establish the Reeve-Irvine Research Center at the
University of California, Irvine.
There was some backlash about our support
for stem cell research, though nothing extreme or life-threatening. There was
some trepidation on the board; people questioned if we want to raise funds, do
we really want to enter into this territory. But it’s becoming less
controversial as education has improved, and as you get a very conservative
senator like Orrin Hatch saying to other people of very deep faith that he
prayed to come up with his answer and this is the answer: This is humane, this
is ethical. In-vitro clinics all over the country are discarding unused eggs,
and instead of throwing them in the dumpster, let’s use them for research so
that a child doesn’t have to suffer with juvenile diabetes, so that your parents
don’t have to suffer from strokes and Alzheimer’s.
I still chair a committee
of the foundation—although I took on a cochair because of my increased
responsibilities—that administers our quality-of-life grant program. These are
small grants, ranging from $5,000 to $25,000, that we give to parks that need
wheelchair-accessible trails, for camps for kids with spina bifida. Just
recently we gave a grant to a shelter in Detroit for women who have been
rendered disabled by abuse. It now takes six full-day meetings to go through the
applications. We had more than $6 million in requests this cycle, and $250,000
was all we could give out. However, we also have an additional $250,000, that
the Centers for Disease Control pays.
The federal government recognized us
as a foundation of excellence and is now giving us $4 million a year, partly to
run the Christopher and Dana Reeve Paralysis Resource Center, which is a
clearinghouse for information. I have to confess, I still have my soft spot for
the quality-of-life grant programs and for the resource center, because it’s
really the people part. Chris used to be the visionary who went to Washington to
lobby for funding, and I was the one who figured out, “Is there a wheelchair
ramp so that our family can get into this movie theater?” I thought if that’s
hard for me, it’s got to be much harder for the majority of people out
there.
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