James Shepherd Jr. BBA ’73 was a great dad.
He never missed one of his son Jamie’s practices. And he took his children on adventures around the world.
James also happened to have quadriplegia. James was only 22 when he sustained a traumatic spinal cord injury while bodysurfing off the coast of Rio de Janeiro. He was paralyzed from the neck down.
“I would hear my dad call hotels and say, ‘I’m disabled. I need a special room,’” recalls Jamie Shepherd BBA ’02.
“And they’d be like, ‘Oh, yeah, Mr. Shepherd, we got one.’ And we’d get to the hotel, and there’s a bathtub, no walk-in, none of the stuff that he actually needs.“And that’s the type of struggles this population goes through on a daily basis.”
But James wasn’t alone. He had a dedicated support system—an army of advocates—pushing for better care not only for him, but for others living with life-altering injuries. Many people with similar traumatic injuries aren’t as fortunate.
James received treatment at an advanced rehab facility in Denver, defying the odds and learning to walk again with the help of a leg brace and cane. But James’s parents, Alana and Harold Shepherd, were shocked when they returned home to Atlanta and found care for spinal cord injuries was essentially nonexistent in the South.
The trio set out to change that, founding Shepherd Center in 1975, along with Dr. David Apple Jr. as the center’s founding medical director. What began as a six-bed unit in a local for-profit hospital quickly grew into a world-renowned neurorehabilitation hospital with 152 beds and its own intensive care unit. Over the next several years, it will expand to 200 beds.
“We fight for hope here. You may not walk out. Your life may look a little different. But it’s still very much a life worth living and worth fighting for.”
JAMIE SHEPHERD, PRESIDENT AND CEO OF THE SHEPHERD CENTER
Although Harold and James passed in 2018 and 2019, respectively, their legacy lives on through the internationally respected center, now headed by Jamie.
Inspired by his family’s dedication to making life better for people traditional health care facilities give up on, Jamie Shepherd spent the last decade in various roles at the center ranging from board member to chief operating officer.
“We’re a small, independent, not-for-profit private hospital. Patients choose to come here, and they choose to come here just because we’re excellent at what we do,” says Jamie Shepherd, who took over as president and CEO in 2024.
Named one of the best rehab hospitals by U.S. News & World Report for two decades, the center rivals much larger hospital systems like the Mayo Clinic when it comes to both quality of care and research. Shepherd Center specializes in care for spinal cord injuries, brain injuries, stroke, trauma, chronic pain, multiple sclerosis, and other neurological injuries and illnesses.
The goal is to restore independence, improve function, and elevate quality of life for a patient population that is sometimes forgotten by larger health care systems, Shepherd says. The care the hospital provides is complex—and often costly. But Shepherd prides itself on its commitment to providing life-changing programs—like recreation therapy and animal-assisted therapy to name a few—even though they’re often unreimbursed costs.
“We fight for hope here. You may not walk out. Your life may look a little different. But it’s still very much a life worth living and worth fighting for,” Shepherd says. “You can still graduate from high school, graduate from college, be a husband, wife, father, son, whatever you want. You can live a meaningful life.
“And it can be fun even if your life now looks a little different than you expected.”
This story appears in the Fall 2025 issue of Georgia Magazine.