Champions Made From Adversity (CMFA) was founded in Evans, Georgia in August of 2007 by three US military veterans and three non-veterans. The veterans were Jeffrey Snover, Scott Winkler and Orlando Perez. The non-veterans were Judie Thompson, Cheryl Snover and Joy Fiske. CMFA was founded to assist those with physical disabilities in finding sports and leisure activities in this area. The CMFA founders were introduced to adapted sports through US Paralympic Committee’s military program. When they returned home they noticed that there were limited services in their local area (i.e. sport opportunities, social activities, etc.) for those who were disabled. CMFA attempted to work with established organizations in area to continue with the sports they were introduced to and found that the only established program was through Walton Foundation which only had a very limited scope. Even the Augusta Veterans Administration Medical Center had no on going out patient recreational programs. It appeared that the local community and the Veterans Administration were not working together to encourage the disabled population here. When CMFA approached local organizations about establishing recreational programs for the disabled they met resistance because of the perceived small population of participants. CMFA decided to strike out on its own and held its first sports clinic in November 2007 which introduced hand cycling to 27 disabled persons to include 18 persons with spinal cord injury or disease.
Currently CMFA runs mulitple sports programs for over 100 participants with over 400 volunteers. With 60,000 disabled persons in the CSRA, CMFA is growing fast!
