Cerebral Palsy Awareness Day 2025
March is Cerebral Palsy Awareness Month, and Cerebral Palsy Awareness Day is March 25th, 2025!
This year, I worked with the Cerebral Palsy Foundation to create shirts for the big day! The Cerebral Palsy Foundation is dedicated to transforming lives for people with cerebral palsy through research, innovation, and collaboration. Recently, CPF started a new project called Cerebral Palsy Grows Up (CPGU), which I actually helped brand as well!
CPGU is a comprehensive initiative to improve healthcare for adults with cerebral palsy. Cerebral Palsy has typically been seen as a childhood neurological disorder, but, kids grow up! CPF recognized the lack of preventative care for adults with CP as we age out of the healthcare system. Through project pillars, CPF & CPGU seeks to conduct research on aging with CP, disseminate the research and translate the knowledge to the public, create policies, advocate for the implementation of the policies, and implement the research into clinical practice.
As an adult with CP, it is an everyday struggle to get adequate healthcare, simply because most doctors don’t have a lot of knowledge about aging with CP. CPF aims to create preventative care and clinical practice guidelines for adults that will cover health areas such as:
Neurocognitive health
Cardiometabolic health
Pain
Musculoskeletal health
Gastrointestinal health
Endocrine health
Respiratory health
Urological and renal health
Sexual health
Mental and behavioral health
The clinical practice guidelines are designed to establish a standard of care for adults with cerebral palsy to be delivered through a whole-body systems approach. Addressing Cerebral Palsy healthcare and aging in this comprehensive manner will allow adults with CP to receive higher quality medical care, leading to overall improvements in quality of life.
Personally, I see about 15 different medical doctors to address individual medical issues. Some of these problems are a direct result of my CP, however, they are treated as separate issues due to a lack of research about adults with CP and how it affects the body over time. It makes me happy to envision a future where doctors have enough knowledge about CP to treat me holistically, rather than attacking problems as separate and not systemic. Being so passionate about disability advocacy, I am always delighted to work with foundations that are creating a better future for people with disabilities.
Here are some of my favorite versions of the design, plus the final design! Pre-orders are available at bonfire.com/2025cpawarenessmonth. Get them quick as the sale ends in just 2 days! Share this article and design to create more Cerebral Palsy Awareness! And, be sure to check out CPF and CPGU for more information about their work!
