Campaign Overview

Unlocking Potential: The Campaign for Kennedy Krieger Institute is a story about potential - the potential to make a significant impact on the lives of children with a vartiety of developmental disabilities worldwide. In addition to addressing the needs of individuals with disabilities such as autism and spinal cord injuries, this campaign will allow us to intensify our search for answers and increase our capabilities for treatment in order to make the kind of groundbreaking advances that we've made in so many other areas over the past seven decades.

"When families come to Kennedy Krieger, they are meeting the people who are writing the textbooks of the future. In addition to providing the care of today, we are creating the care of tomorrow." - Gary W. Goldstein, M.D., President

• Adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD) strips the myelin sheaths from the brain's fibers, destroying a child's ability to speak, see and move within five years. Researcher Hugo Moser and others have shown conslusively that Lorenzo's Oil, in concert with a low-fat diet, can prevent the onset of the rapidly progressive and devastating form of this rare disease that affects boys.
  
  
• Recently, our scientists confirmed that children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have smaller frontal lobes of the brain. This research builds on another Kennedy Krieger study showing that this region controls a key behavior, called "response inhibition," which is generally lacking in children with ADHD, and contributes to the impulsiveness, hyperactivity, and inattentiveness characteristic to the disorder
  
  
• Using advanced neuroimaging techniques, our researchers found the unexpected: abnormal pathways in the part of the brain where sensory information is processed, rather than in the motor control areas of the brain. This suggests that sensory processing may be very important for controlling muscle tone and movement in children with cerebral palsy.

Could the absence of gravity help a child with cerebral palsy learn to walk? Could mapping the journey of a disease as it makes its way through a child's brain give us the answer for curing it? Could we one day repair damaged limbs by actually regenerating cells?

Those may seem like far-fetched ideas today, but they represent the kind of imaginative thinking that will lead us to the answers, therapies, preventions and cures of tomorrow. At Kennedy Krieger, we believe a child's potential is not limited by his or her disability or injury - it is only limited by our imagination to find the answers. With your support we can move closer to unraveling the mysteries of autism and make real advancements in the field of spinal cord injuries.

If you are interested in receiving materials about our Capital Campaign, please contact us