Establishing the Franklin Elieh Fund and Increasing Rehabilitation Support

NorCal SCI co-founder Franklin Elieh

In our efforts to maintain transparency and keep our community informed of our endeavors, we’d like to provide an important update on some NorCal SCI initiatives.

Our board recently made the decision not to commit our finances to open The Franklin Elieh Center (in honor of our co-founder), which we had been working on and attempting to accomplish for the last few years. We've instead decided to allocate the funding to give more individuals throughout Northern California the opportunity to pursue vital rehabilitation therapies.

We will therefore be setting up "The Franklin Elieh Fund" specifically to support our vision of continuing to offer intensive rehab to those newly injured, as well as to develop a program for those with longer lengths of injuries to maintain their physical health and mental well-being.

This was a difficult decision but we believe it will be the best way to serve the SCI community as well as to honor Franklin's legacy.

Ultimately, we decided that we can better serve the SCI community by expanding our programs at all the SCI-FIT locations in Northern California and at Neuroworx in Utah rather than committing a significant portion of our funds to a single location, which would only serve a small geographic area and challenge our mission of serving the entire Northern California community. As of today, SCI-FIT has 5 sites in Northern California (Dublin (HQ), Sacramento, Fresno, Petaluma, Modesto) with a 6th planned on the Peninsula.

In 2024, our donors' generosity allowed us to give 50 newly injured the opportunity to pursue vital rehabilitation and exercise therapy costing $221,000 through The Franklin Project and The Newly Injured grant programs.

With the creation of the Franklin Elieh Fund, we will be better placed to significantly enhance the size and scope of these important initiatives and have a much larger impact on the communities we support.