Penn Charter’s soccer athletes partnered with Unity Sports for inclusive sports program for children with special needs
"Our kids look at these athletes like they’re LeBron James," said Dolan Fund executive director Danielle Griffith.
When India Knight’s twin nephews, Major and Mason Lewis, came into her life on Dec. 1, 2022, she put her own on hold to “give the boys a chance in life,” her sister Jhalia Thomas said.
Both boys have autism and were nonverbal at 1½ years old when Knight and her mother got custody of them. Her nephews needed stability, support and opportunities to learn, she said.
Knight, who worked in case management for Philadelphia County probationers and state parolees, left the field in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but planned to return to work. However, she dedicated hours to speech, behavioral and cognitive therapy and early intervention at Easterseals for her nephews, as well as taking them to all the events in the city, including swim lessons and Halloween events.
“The more they’re exposed, the more they’ll learn,” Knight said.
On Saturday, she brought them to the Unity Sports recreational soccer program, where children with intellectual, emotional and physical disabilities play alongside student-athletes from Penn Charter’s boys and girls soccer teams.
The program, run by the Kelly Anne Dolan Memorial Fund in partnership with Penn Charter, began in September 2025 with the intention of building a community where children and families of varying abilities could run around a soccer field, kick the ball, and spend time with peers.
“I wanted to create a community within the fund for parents and siblings and caregivers to be together and not separate and to be in a safe space with no judgments,” executive director Danielle Griffith said. “It also gives the parents time to talk to each other because the best resources are other parents.”
The fund was established 50 years ago by Joe and Peggy Dolan to provide financial assistance to families experiencing difficulties related to their children’s diagnosis, illness or injury. The Dolans noticed during their daughter’s battle with leukemia in 1976 that parents with children in the hospital were losing their jobs, homes, cars and more because of the financial and time-related costs of caring for a seriously ill child.
Over the past 50 years, the fund has helped more than 50,000 families and paid over $10 million in bills.
“While we’re small, we are mighty,” Griffith said. “I just think it’s really important that our families get time together to just have fun because they don’t get that often.”
Griffith wanted to expand the organization’s work beyond financial assistance by creating opportunities for children to experience the benefits of athletics. She says her son, Rowan, who plays baseball at Catholic University and graduated from Penn Charter, learned resilience, teamwork and the ability to overcome adversity through sports, and she wanted the Dolan fund children to learn those same lessons.
Katrina Burgess found Unity Sports on a Facebook support group page, at a time when she said her son Toby was anti-social and did not want to play in group sports.
“Batman works alone,” she remembers him saying, so he did too.
Toby, 15, was born typical, Burgess said, but he started having seizures at 2½ years old. He was later diagnosed with Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, a rare and severe form of uncontrolled epilepsy, and intellectual disabilities followed. Finding activities where Toby felt comfortable was not always easy, Burgess said, until Unity Sports.
“We started finding programs like Unity where it takes the older high school and college kids and they work with them and really got Toby into it,” Burgess said. “Now he feels like the cool guy on campus.”
Toby’s 11-year-old twin brothers also came on Saturday, making it a family event where they all could play.
“With my kids having such a wide range of abilities, it is really hard to just do family things,” Burgess said. “I can’t describe the happiness you have when all your kids are satisfied in an event like this.”
Knight said she has seen firsthand how difficult it can be to find inclusive opportunities for her nephews. Many soccer teams in the area are not open to the idea of children with special needs playing on their teams, she said. Knight said the Eagles use their platform to create unity within the city and in the future, she hopes they could expand sports for children with special needs.
“I really would love for them to play club soccer, so if Unity Sports and the Eagles could push that forward in some way, that would be great,” Knight said.
The Penn Charter student-athletes served as “buddies” to the Dolan fund children on Saturday and kicked the ball together, ran around the field and ate snacks with them.
“Our [The Dolan Fund] kids look at these athletes like they’re LeBron James,” Griffith said. “It’s such an opportunity for our families to bond with these athletes, to see what’s possible in life, to be on these beautiful fields for parents to be able to just relax and watch and you know really just enjoy all the togetherness, the inclusion.”
