This is the story of Yurii Vlizlo — a lawyer by profession and a leader by calling, whose life was changed by a single accident. After a severe injury he not only regained his independence, but became a board member of the Group for Active Rehabilitation (GAR).
«Life becomes different, and in some ways even deeper»: the story of a board member of the Group for Active Rehabilitation
Until the age of 30, the life of Yurii Vlizlo was a fast-moving one: a law degree and work in his field, and hobbies with a thrill to them — fishing, hunting, off-road driving in modified vehicles.
Everything changed after an injury to the cervical spine at the C7 level, which he sustained after an unlucky dive into water. A great many difficulties appeared:
- his hands had no grip;
- it was hard to keep his balance;
- the wheelchair he used at first was uncomfortable and far too big.
For Yurii, getting to know the Group for Active Rehabilitation began not with lofty ideas but with very practical, everyday questions. His physical therapist in Ternopil told him about GAR. At first it was an acquaintance at a distance: he watched videos on the organisation’s YouTube channel, followed its social media and took part in an online camp.
«Looking for the answers yourself takes a long time, and you do not always get the right information. When I came to the seminars GAR ran in hospitals, I could hear in plain language exactly what interested me: self-care, medical matters and even intimate life. That was far simpler than trying to work it all out on my own,» Yurii recalls.
Later, through the organisation, he received an active-type Panthera wheelchair. That was an important step: his old chair was heavy and did not match his body, which only hindered his recovery and limited his access in everyday life.
The real change came at the 2023 Active Rehabilitation Camp. The camps work on the peer-to-peer principle: the instructors are people who have spinal cord injuries themselves. For Yurii, that example was Andrii Shcherbatskyi.
«When you see in front of you a person with the same injury showing you how to do things, it inspires trust. At the camp I rethought a great deal. For instance, I saw that driving a car with hand controls really is possible, although before that I thought my hands would never manage it. I have been driving for a year and a half now and have covered more than 60,000 kilometres,» Yurii says.
A new role: counselling and management
Quite quickly Yurii moved from taking part in GAR projects to organising them. First he trained and became a remote counsellor, helping people with spinal cord injuries work through their problems: advising on self-care, on improving their quality of life and much else.
In 2024 and 2025 Yurii was already organising camps in Chortkiv. That is serious work: selecting participants and coordinating the whole team.
Of particular importance to him was the tetra camp for people with cervical spinal cord injuries, where participants were taught simple but critically important things:
- how to get dressed on your own;
- how to make a sandwich;
- how to manage in the shower, and so on.
Today Yurii Vlizlo is a member of the GAR board. He says a camp has a special atmosphere that is hard to reproduce in ordinary life. It is ten days of intensive work in which people gain skills that might have taken years at home.
«I like seeing the result: a person arrives at the camp in one state, and ten days later leaves a completely different one. That is what motivates me to do this work. It is not always about money; it is about the fact that this once helped me, and now I want to pass that experience on. Life does not end after an injury — it simply becomes different, and in some ways even deeper,» Yurii concludes.
Against the odds — the accessibility standards ignored in the country’s reconstruction, or his own inner barriers — Yurii keeps working so that a barrier-free environment and the values of active rehabilitation become available to everyone who needs them. For him GAR is not just an organisation, but a space where a person’s dignity and independence are given back.
This publication was prepared within the project «A civic platform in support of a barrier-free society in Ukraine» with the support of the Askold and Dir Foundation, administered by ISAR Ednannia within the project «A strong civil society of Ukraine — a driver of reforms and democracy», funded by Norway and Sweden.
