Arts for Ataxia

Vital Stats

Baltimore, MD

  • people helped600
  • People Doing It 16

The Problem

Ataxia is a movement disorder affecting the cerebellum. Patients experience a comprehensive lack of coordination: this causes deficits in arm and leg motions, speech, and eye movements. Treatment options are limited, there is no cure, and impeding progress is a lack of research funding. This lack of funding can be attributed to a lack of awareness - not many people know what Ataxia is, or why it is important! Aside from being a debilitating disease that affects 150,000 Americans, it is what is called a 'model' disorder, meaning that studying it can help us learn more about how our brains control movement.

Plan of Action

I'm planning an awareness-building picnic at my school for September 25th, 2010 - National Ataxia Day. This event will be called “Arts for Ataxia”. It will feature a joint talent competition between student arts groups and ataxia patients, research presentations, and a picnic. The collaborative effort will engage the campus with the Baltimore community at large, and help to raise ataxia awareness. We will disseminate information about the event through the National Ataxia Foundation. Following this event, I will begin an independent student-run pilot movement therapy program for ataxic patients, based on dance technique. My group, the Johns Hopkins Ataxia Ambassadors, has made big changes to put the project into action. The size of the group has nearly doubled, and we have held a logo contest to create an "Arts for Ataxia" logo, contacted the National Ataxia Foundation, and thrown on-campus candy selling fundraisers to build awareness. In further efforts to procure seed money we applied to an online award that is based on public online voting - people voted every day to put us from 177th place to the top 20. Unfortunately we slipped down right in the last couple of days and were ineligible for the award, but the sheer volume of people we got to vote for us truly shows how excited people are about the event, and how much it would impact the community.
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