KANSAS CITY, KAN. ? Steve Palermo, the baseball umpire left partially paralyzed by a shooting in 1991, has found a new outlet for his efforts to help fund research on spinal cord injuries.

Palermo has raised more than $3 million during the past decade for that purpose, with much of the money from his Steve Palermo Foundation for Spinal Cord Injuries going to the National Paralysis Foundation.

But since that organization closed in July, Palermo had been looking for another way to continue his work, one he’s now found with Kansas University.

“We’re jumping right back in,” Palermo told The Kansas City Star. “The name of our organization is different, but we’ll be doing basically the same thing. We didn’t work all these years to make all these relationships, to help all these people, and then just let it all die.”

Mike Wall, vice president for medical development with the Kansas University Endowment Association, said Palermo and his family would help raise funds to further research projects at the University of Kansas Hospital and the KU School of Medicine.

“We’re very excited about this partnership,” Wall said of the venture with the new Steve Palermo Endowment for Spinal Cord Injury, Research and Education. “We’re already the only facility in the area that can deliver these things. With the Palermos on board, our program will grow even further in stature.”

He said the university’s research center was one of about a dozen in the nation.

“We would like to take our research in basic science and translate that to clinical trials, new drugs or stem cell research to regenerate the damaged nerves,” said Dr. Paul Arnold, the neurosurgery professor who directs the center. “The discoveries we think we can make in the lab will translate into treatment for patients with spinal cord injuries.”

Palermo, now 54, was a member of an American League umpiring team when he was shot and wounded in July 1991 in Dallas. Leaving a restaurant with friends after a game, he was shot when he tried to come to the aid of two women who were being mugged.

At first, a neurosurgeon believed he would never walk again, but he made progress through therapy so that today he walks with a cane and a leg brace, and works for the baseball commissioner’s office as a supervisor of umpires.

Television sportscaster Bob Costas has been a major helper to the Palermo effort, raising $1.9 million over the last nine years. Diane Aaron, Palermo’s mother-in-law and director of the endowment, said he has agreed to do his “Later with Bob Costas in Kansas City” fund-raiser again on Jan. 29.