History

In 1946, veterans who came home from World War II with spinal cord injuries made a decision: they refused to accept a lesser life. That decision built the Paralyzed Veterans of America. It still holds today.

These service members returned to a grateful nation, but also to a world with few solutions to the major challenges they faced. Rather than accept limitations, they made a decision not just to live, but to live with dignity as contributors to society. They created Paralyzed Veterans of America, an organization dedicated to serving veterans and to medical research, advocacy, and civil rights for all people with disabilities. Congress chartered PVA in 1947 as the only veterans service organization focused solely on spinal cord injury and disorder.

From the very beginning, sports were central. When those first veterans had nowhere to go and sat in hospital wards in California, they started their own wheelchair basketball. Veterans played the first wheelchair basketball game in 1946. That spirit — of finding what was still possible and doing it — has never left this organization.

A world where every veteran living with a spinal cord injury or disorder can live fully — with independence, dignity, and purpose — and where no one has to figure out what that looks like alone. Colonial PVA exists to be the place where people discover what is still possible, often for the first time. Isolation turns into community. Uncertainty turns into confidence. The possibilities are endless, and we will keep finding ways to open every door. No one is ever left behind.