Adira Foundation was founded in 2019 by a group of highly skilled public health and health policy advocates with a single focus to invest in better lives for people with neurodegenerative diseases. To accomplish this goal, we committed to centering the voices, experiences and needs of individuals living with and impacted by ALS, Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, Multiple Sclerosis and Parkinson’s Disease.
Adira Foundation convened people living with NDs and other stakeholders in search of best practices and lessons learned from large-scale integrated health programs such as those U.S. domestic and global efforts on HIV, tuberculosis, and similar urgent health threats and apply them to neurodegenerative diseases.
These large-scale ideas were ambitious goals programmatically and, therefore, financially ambitious as well. Over three years, Adira Foundation, our visionary funding partners and our 25 non-profit grantees throughout the country made much progress. Adira’s legacy website details these successes and will be available into the future.
The board and staff of Adira Foundation are proud of these accomplishments and are deeply grateful for the collaborations with innumerable partners. While we are confident that the collaborations and the successes of the past three years will live on, the Adira Foundation Board concluded that the onset of the COVID pandemic immediately following Adira’s launch, caused insurmountable challenges in creating the necessary momentum – relationship development, brand recognition and fundraising – to sustain an ambitious, new, systems-change endeavor.
After several months of scenario planning, the board recently voted to dissolve Adira Foundation as an independent entity. The board and CEO are unequivocally committed to ensuring an orderly, respectful and smooth transition for staff, contractors and stakeholders and are working proactively to relocate key programs and to find new homes for Adira’s unique programmatic contributions, reports, lessons learned and remaining financial assets.
In closing, but most noteworthy, the Adira Foundation Board also wants to publicly acknowledge the dedication and hard work of the Adira Foundation Staff, most notably the vision and contributions of founding CEO, Greg Smiley. His tireless conviction, eternal optimism and unwavering commitment to centering the voices of individuals living with NDs will be among Adira Foundation’s most important contributions to the field.
– Adira Foundation, Board of Directors