Tiana Tozer was injured in an accident at just 20-years-old, but has turned that horrifying experience into something larger.
Tozer is a two-time Paralympic medalist for the USA Women's Wheelchair Basketball team, where she suited up for five years while earning one bronze and a silver medal.
She will be in Prince George next month as part of the ICBC road safety speaker series.
In 1988, she was hit in the car she was in as an intoxicated driver had run a stop sign.
It took her four years to walk again and she needed more than 30 surgeries.
Tozer has also worked in Iraq, where she started a program that taught people with disabilities to advocate for themselves and become social change agents.
She would also run a program where 10,000 women learned to read and write.
Tozer also worked in Sudan as the State Director in Kordofan where another program was taught to build government capacity to deliver services.
While being a speaker and sharing her story, she is also a consultant where she focuses on hiring people with disabilities to help companies diversify their workforces.
She has two talks scheduled for Prince George on May 2; Duchess Park Secondary at 10:05 a.m. and the College of New Caledonia at 1 p.m.
ICBC says on average, seven youth are killed and 400 are injured in roughly 1,800 crashes each year in the North Central Region (based on BC Coroner data from 2016).
Contributing factors in youth injury crashes are distracted driving (33 per cent), speed (17 per cent), and impaired driving (six per cent).
Factors for youth fatal crashes are speed (34 per cent), distracted driving (26 per cent), and impaired driving (17 per cent).
