MotusAcademy Foundation
The part of the work that cannot be sold.
Some of what recovery needs is a product. Most of it is knowledge, and a way for people to reach it. The Foundation is where we do the second part, and we do it in the open.
MotusAcademy Foundation · UEI YP8CAQVKGXM7
Teaches what is actually known
Rehabilitation moves quickly and unevenly. A technique that is ordinary in one hospital has not reached the next state. The Foundation takes what the research community has established and puts it in front of the people who will use it on a Tuesday morning, in plain language, without a fee at the door.
Courses, teaching sessions, open material. When we learn something from our own work, it goes into the teaching rather than into a slide deck for investors.
The therapist with a full caseload
The one who trained years ago, who has forty minutes a week that are genuinely their own, and who is the only person in a hundred miles doing this job.
And the student who has not yet decided whether this field is worth a career. We would like them to see the interesting version of it before they see the tired one.
Closes the distance to the equipment
The gap in rehabilitation is rarely the science. It is that the thing which would help sits in a building you cannot get to, in a city you do not live in, during hours you are working.
So the access work is unglamorous and specific: getting technology in front of people who would otherwise never touch it, showing families how to use what they already have, and being honest when the answer is that something is not right for them.
The family doing it alone at home
Most of the work of recovery happens outside the clinic. Which means it happens in a kitchen, at a kitchen table, with a paper sheet of exercises and nobody watching.
Michael says it this way: “Caregivers are the invisible backbone of healthcare. They show up every day, often without a thank you, often without a break.” Rosalynn Carter made the point years ago that caregiving is not a category some people fall into, it is one almost everybody passes through, in one direction or the other. The Foundation is built for that whole set of people rather than a tidy slice of it.
Puts people in the same room
Clinicians, engineers, researchers and the families themselves, in one conversation rather than three separate ones that never meet. Most of the good ideas we have had came out of a room like that, usually from the person who was invited last.
Whoever is usually left off the invitation
The home health aide. The daughter who moved back in. The veteran who has been through the system long enough to know exactly where it breaks, and has never once been asked.
We have these challenges, but we are all in this together. When we serve the community, the community serves us, and it has never once gone the other way round.
The direction is east, and we are being careful about how we say it.
The Foundation intends to extend its education and access work into Europe. Poland and Ukraine are the first focus, for the plainest reason: that is where the need is concentrated, and that is where Michael went to see it for himself rather than read about it.
This is intent, not an executed partnership. Nothing has been signed. No organization has agreed to anything with us, and we are not going to imply otherwise by putting a logo on a page. When there is something real to announce, it will be announced in those words.
Michael went to the Superhumans Center in Lviv at their invitation, and what he saw there is the reason this section exists at all. It is a better description of what is at stake than anything we could write in the third person.
When the war in Ukraine ends.
The Foundation intends to open a fund to support home rehabilitation for soldiers injured in that war. Ukrainian and Russian both.
Choosing which injured young person deserves to walk again is not a decision a rehabilitation organization should be making.
We want to be exact about what this is. It is not a statement about the war. It is not a position on who was right, and nothing in it should be read as one. It is not an open fund today, there is nothing to give to, and nobody is being asked for anything.
It is a commitment we are putting in writing now, so that when the day comes we cannot quietly decide it was too complicated. A twenty year old with a spinal injury and a mother who has stopped sleeping is the same problem in Kharkiv as in Sioux Falls. We know how to help with that specific problem. That is the only expertise we are claiming here.
If you teach, if you research, if you run a service that is short of everything except need, the Foundation would like to hear from you. Especially if you are going to tell us we have got something wrong.
MotusAcademy Foundation is the nonprofit. It is a separate legal entity with its own registration. UEI YP8CAQVKGXM7.