It’s a rare gift to be able to take tragedy and turn it into 50 years’ worth of service and support. Yet, that is exactly the path North Philly native Peggy Dolan, age 80, has taken.
One morning in March 1972, Dolan went to wake her two-year-old daughter, Kelly Anne, and immediately knew something was wrong: “She was a grayish color,” she says. That same day, a blood test revealed Kelly Anne’s blood count had dropped to half of what is considered normal.
“She was diagnosed with aplastic anemia, which essentially meant her bone marrow was shutting down the production of blood products — not making red cells to carry oxygen throughout the body and white cells to fight infections, or platelets to control bleeding,” Dolan explains.
It sent the small family, then residing in Ambler, on a whirlwind of doctor visits, blood transfusions, hospitalizations at Montgomery Hospital and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia … culminating in Kelly Anne contracting a rare form of leukemia. She died in 1976.
Dolan and her late husband Joe had seen the raw, devastating impact of childhood illness on both children and their families. In Kelly Anne’s obituary, they included a call to action: Help others managing this world of hospital bills and extended stays.
“We raised about $8,000, which was a lot of money for 1976,” says Dolan, who calculated that it’s equivalent to $47,000 today. Buoyed by her success, she soon founded the Kelly Anne Dolan Memorial Fund (KADMF).
“Our family had been supported in so many ways, and we were left with such a sense of gratitude. Kelly Anne’s fund gave us an outlet to give back,” Dolan says.
A half century later, the KADMF remains an incredible support for families in and near Philadelphia in need, raising more than $10 million to support more than 45,000 families of children with serious illnesses, disabilities and injuries.
The drive to give back
Dolan stresses that the weight of childhood illness goes beyond a diagnosis; it flips a family’s entire routine, finances and mindset on their heads.
“Anytime Kelly was hospitalized, I was hospitalized, because you can’t leave a two-year-old in an isolation room by themselves,” Dolan says. Like many other families with sick children, she had to put a pause on her own career in sales and marketing in order to be with her child.
Kelly Anne’s illness opened a door to a whole new reality, where hardship was the norm.
“I used to hear about diseases and disorders and birth defects, but they were just names to me. And then we went through this with Kelly for four years, I began to see these names as faces. I saw kids who were burned in fires, kids who were injured critically in accidents. I met their parents and talked to them and learned that they were losing their jobs or in the process of having their electricity turned off,” Dolan says.
One mother’s story solidified Dolan’s determination to do something more. The woman was a single parent to two boys, one with a cancer diagnosis. As time passed, Dolan and this mom would grab coffee together and became close. One day Dolan found her friend crying in the hall.
“She had no cash left,” she says. Her friend had spent so much time in the hospital that she lost her job and had to decide how to get home to pay the babysitter who was looking after her other son.
“The [hospital] social worker had made her fill out a couple of forms and asked how she was budgeting her money,” Dolan recalls. “After all that questioning and filling out forms, she was given $5 to get home. Then she had to worry about the next day.”
Dolan’s friend’s son was buried in a mass grave inside a Styrofoam coffin. His family could not afford a private plot.
“It was an experience that chilled me to the bone, because I realized how many parents would be in that shape,” she says. “That’s when my husband started to talk to me about creating a fund.”
It wasn’t easy. At that time the only examples of medical funding support were large institutions like the American Red Cross or the American Lung Association. The fund’s earliest contributors learned about it through word of mouth, often from Dolan herself.
“There was no road to follow, no people to call to help. Then, one day, my husband was reading our local paper and saw this tiny little notice of an event put on by Prudential Insurance in Fort Washington,” shares Dolan.
The event? An introductory seminar for nonprofits on grant writing. “It was the best $15 I ever spent in my life,” she says.
Building community, strengthening resources
The KADMF services families across and in the region around Philadelphia, without regard to diagnosis or request.
“We didn’t just want to focus on one disease, because it doesn’t matter if your child has cancer or cystic fibrosis or sickle cell anemia or a very serious genetic disorder, neurologic disorder,” says Dolan. Illness “takes parents away from jobs; it takes parents away from siblings. It places them with all kinds of expenses to overcome.”
“When I started working at CHOP in 1980, the Kelly Anne Fund was one of the few funds available for patients who weren’t strictly oncological patients,” says Dolores Vorters, retired director of social work for CHOP and a former member of the KADMF board.
A social worker and later department director at CHOP, Vorters referred families with all kinds of needs to KADMF. “One time, Peggy even referred me to an oil company to help get oil for a family’s heater in winter,” Vorters says.
Such is the way Dolan thinks about the families she serves. Over time, her fund has adapted to meet families where they are, including facing recent cutbacks in federal aid.
“Over the past year, we have seen an increase in applications for assistance compared with the previous year, with our average number of applications per month rising considerably,” says Danielle Scott-Griffith, the KADMF’s executive director. She adds that while this increase is apparent, their work is not to explain why families need what they need, only to meet as much need as they can.
That often means supplementing electric, water, phone, gas, or cable bills, as well as rent, car payments, adaptive equipment and health insurance co-pays. The KADMF’s bill assistance program provides up to $750 per year per family. Families can reapply after one year.
A few decades ago, the fund acquired another nonprofit, Kolbe Hopeful Nights, which helps pay for hotel stays for families traveling to CHOP for treatment. And, in June 2026, KADMF launched the ExchangeABLE program, bridging the gap in access to pediatric medical equipment needed in the home.
Every holiday season, the KADMF hosts HOPE For The Holidays Adopt-a-Family program.“One year, we literally had Christmas because of them,” says Amanda Wall, mother of two. Her daughter, age 6, has autism, with moderate needs that prevented her from remaining in daycare. Wall was forced to cut back her work hours from 40 to 20 a week.
“Everything [the KADMF] does is very welcoming for families that have kids with special needs,” she says. The Christmas program not only included her daughter but also her son — something Wall stressed was so generous and thoughtful.
The fund has even hosted the Wall family for a night out on the Spirit of Philadelphia, giving them a place to feel seen: “It was nice to be able to go to an event and do things in public and have an opportunity to be around people like us and feel normal.”
Twice a year, the Spirit’s director donates the ship to the fund. “We do a fundraiser with one of the events. [For the second event], we decided to give [the ship] to the families,” says Dolan.
A lasting endeavor
Dolan says she never set out to make this fund her life’s work, but she knows all the same it is necessary work.
“In a lot of ways, I was lucky that marketing and sales were my background, because … [the fund] was like selling a mission and getting people to understand what you’re talking about,” she says. But her background isn’t what draws people to her.
“One of the things that struck me about Peggy [when we first met] was she was just so warm. It felt like you’d almost known her your entire life. She just has that ability to be very conversive and open,” Vorters says. “She’s willing to do whatever she can to help a family.”
“I’ve met with Peggy and talked with her. Thanked her for all the fund has been able to do. You would have thought she’d known me forever when she first met me,” Wall adds.
While Dolan officially retired in 2016, she remains on the board and active, supporting the four full-time staff members who manage daily operations and the innumerable volunteers that bring the KADMF’s mission to life. The team knows that 50 years isn’t something to bat their lashes at.
And in a lot of ways the work has just begun.
“A lot of funds would be around for a little while and then disappear, due to lack of contributions,” says Vorters of her time as a social worker. “But Peggy always found the way to grow [the KADMF] and sustain itself. It has already grown in a lot of ways.”
Dolan calls medical and financial debts among families facing serious illness “a national problem. I would like to see us be a major voice for families in these situations nationwide, through government support, medical and non-medical support.”
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