Boyd Melson is a West Point graduate, a Captain in the Army Reserve and a professional boxer. In fact, he's the junior middleweight World Boxing Council's U.S. Champion. He has donated every penny of the hundreds of thousands he has won to charity. All but one purse has gone to spinal cord research.

"It's not unusual for athletes to take their passion for a cause and use their platform,” says Jill Diamond, chair of World Boxing Cares. “Boyd goes a step further because he gives his entire purse to his charity and works a side job in order to sustain himself."

Melson’s passion is personal. It started when he fell in love with a woman named Christan.

"Christan broke her neck when she was ten years old in a diving accident, and I met her when she was 19,” Melson explained during a workout at Mendez Boxing Gym. “It was the end of my junior year at West Point and it just happened. We became a couple, and then slowly her dream, and I saw how much she wanted it, even at that point being paralyzed for nine years of 'I will walk again one day.'"

No longer a couple, Boyd still promised Christan he would never give up on her dream, and he made a promise to himself to help those returning home from war.

"From 2001 to 2011, we had seven thousand armed forces members returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan paralyzed,” Melson says. “I said to myself, 'I'm a West Point grad, a captain in the Army Reserve, these are my people especially.'"

Boyd is working with Dr. Wise Young to bring a clinical trial that Dr. Yung had great success in China with to the United States. It involves putting umbilical cord stem cells into the spinal cords of long-term paralysis patients. But they still need another 1.2 million dollars to fund it. Dr. Yung hopes to have FDA approval in the coming months.

"It's incredibly good that we have a therapy that is restoring walking to 75 percent of people and they're also getting their bowel/bladder function in half of them,” Young says.

Boyd leads Team Fight to Walk and is asking everyone to donate just one dollar

"This month that this airs we could fund it all. If everyone, teamfighttowalk.com, I'll give a dollar," Melson says.

In the next Healthy Living segment, find out more about Boyd and Dr. Young's efforts and how the trial would work.