Peggy took this tragedy, the knowledge she gained after having not one but two severely ill daughters - the youngest of her three girls, Kim, ultimately recovered from her leukemia - and transformed the experience into a gift of helping others.
On Sunday, at a Crystal Tea Room reception in the Wanamaker Building, the Kelly Anne Dolan Fund will celebrate 35 years and the 20,000 families it has assisted since the young girl's death.
"You can't help but be aware when you spend a lot of time in Children's Hospital. It becomes a community unto itself," Dolan says in her Lower Gwynedd home. She met parents so financially strapped that they skipped meals and even buried their children in Styrofoam caskets.
The Dolan Fund administers assistance, through referrals from social workers and other health-care professionals, for the ancillary expenses accrued by families with seriously sick children - rent, utility bills, transportation, child care, air conditioners for those with severe respiratory ailments, funeral costs. Nothing can prepare a family for having a desperately ill child, "but the more we can take off their plate and help, the better," Dolan says. Since its inception, the fund has disbursed $8 million, as well as noncash donations.
Dolan's organization provides advocacy and education for families negotiating the complex shoals of a medical crisis, as well as outings and celebrations for parents and children who need some joy. Dolan is the fund's executive director. Her husband died in 1995, a year after the family printing business went bankrupt.
