The Ontario Neurotrauma Foundation (ONF), after 23 years of making a difference in the lives of those living with spinal cord and acquired brain injuries, closed its doors on March 31, 2021.
Started by the neurotrauma community in 1998, helmed by the trail-blazing work of Kent Bassett-Spiers, ONF’s founding and only CEO, ONF helped grow the number of researchers devoted to neurotrauma care and prevention.
Maintaining unique partnerships with the community, listening to their priorities, and developing/implementing best practices, were critical to ONF’s operations and remain a part of the legacy that Kent established.
Under Kent’s leadership, the Foundation evolved from an organization focused on grants, to a knowledge broker ensuring that research was put into practice. ONF charted a course for patient-oriented and impactful research through its efforts to facilitate multi-disciplinary collaboration, its extensive provincial, national, and international partnerships, its networking capacity, and its knowledge generation, mobilization, and implementation programs. ONF’s work, under Kent, has set the standard for neurotrauma care in Ontario and beyond.
In honour of Kent Basset-Spiers, who worked tirelessly to build lasting improvements for people with SCI, Spinal Cord Injury Ontario and Canadian Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation Association have created the Kent Basset-Spiers Award.
The award will recognize an outstanding individual who has demonstrated long-term, influential commitment to people with spinal cord injuries, including research, industry achievement, health care and/or community service to the spinal cord injury community.
On behalf of Spinal Cord Injury Ontario and the Canadian Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation Association, we would like to thank Kent Basset-Spiers for his dedication and contributions to the SCI community, the defining characteristics of the model ONF and Kent pioneered will continue to enable successor programs for years to come.
