On September 11, 2025, Kara McClurken was invited to speak at the CavFutures Foundation’s Champions of the Community event, honoring their grant recipients.
Good evening, and thank you for inviting me to say a few words about the impact of the Champions of the Community grant for my non-profit, Bennett’s Village, and the importance of community and creating opportunities for people to gather together in community spaces.
We at Bennett’s Village believe that everyone deserves a place to play. Our work focuses on creating spaces where people of all ages and abilities can relax, explore, recreate, connect, and thrive together. We have partnered with the City of Charlottesville to transform nearly four acres of Pen Park into a multigenerational all-abilities playspace. We believe that inclusive play is not only possible, it’s essential for building stronger, more compassionate communities.
I am not just the co-founder and executive director of Bennett’s Village–I am also Bennett and Ananda’s mom.
Bennett loved to play. With his sister, with his cousins, with his Gram and Papa, with his friends. As a member of our community who lived with Spinal Muscular Atrophy, he used a wheelchair to get around. Most playspaces are not designed for kids or adults in wheelchairs. They’re not designed for those who use walkers, canes, or strollers. They’re not designed with low vision folks in mind or those with cochlear implants. Many places lack accessible bathrooms or fencing to prevent elopement, all of which create barriers for play and limits our ability to build community.
We used to have to drive over an hour away to find an all abilities playspace where Bennett could fully be included. It’s so important for children’s social emotional wellbeing to be able to play side by side with their friends as independently as possible. It’s so important for parents and caregivers that places exist where they, too, can relax for a moment or two while their child or adult who needs care and support can have safe access to outdoor spaces, where they can have a moment to breathe or connect with other caregivers.
Bennett dreamed of a place in Charlottesville where he and his friends could play together. For his fifth birthday, he asked us if he could have his birthday party in Richmond, in a place where everyone could be together and he could access all parts of the playspace. But it’s over an hour away and some of his friends didn’t have cars. And so I explained to him that it was just too far.
I should stop here and say that Bennett had a lovely 5th birthday party at his church playground. But I didn’t forget his request.
Nine months later, Bennett passed away. It was unexpected–so unexpected that we had signed up to bring in food for a class cooking project later that week. It was really important to his dad and I that we be the ones to bring that food to his kindergarten classmates, to sit with them in community and acknowledge this loss that we were still trying to process.
As we were making our way back out of the school and through the playground, his dad and I turned to each other and we said, “Let’s take this pain, but also also let’s take Bennett’s light and his joy and his magical ability to bring people together and let’s create the playspace that he envisioned for our community.”
And Bennett’s Village the community was born.
Since the founding of Bennett’s Village, there have been several moments when UVA athletes have joined Bennett’s Village in creating a more interconnected community–early on in our work, members of the Women’s Basketball and volleyball teams joined the Charlottesville Cardinals to play a wheelchair basketball game as a fundraiser. A few of the men’s basketball team serve as referees. Student athletes were thrust into a situation where they had to adapt to shooting baskets from a much lower height, with limited experience using a wheelchair to power across the court. I was impressed by their composure as they played against the Cardinals, for whom their chairs were a regular part of their lives and the game. But my favorite moment from that event was one not one where a UVA athlete missed or successfully shot a basket, but a moment where a young girl discovered for the first time that she, too, could play basketball, that her wheelchair would not prevent her from playing. That one moment was more valuable than the money we raised that night. That night, diverse groups of people from different segments of our community came together for a united cause, to build bridges instead of divisions, to bring elementary school students together with college and community residents, families and teachers, coaches and players, town and gown, all coming together to form community.
The student athletes have also helped us with other fundraising efforts–the members of the football team spent a night last summer serving soda for tips and sharing information about our project at the Bennett’s Village table at Fridays after Five. The sight of three large football players behind the tiny soda cart still brings a smile to my face.
The student athletes are not afraid of hard work or of freezing temperatures–last December, several of them joined the Piedmont Master Gardeners and some UVA Library volunteers to help plant native shrubs and grasses along the steep slope behind the playspace to prevent erosion and return the land to a better place than we had found it when we started construction.
And then, this spring, like the rest of the groups here tonight, Bennett’s Village was awarded a Champions of the Community grant. These grants aren’t just about giving money, they are about integrating the student athletes and the time, talent, and treasure they have to share, into the larger central Virginia community, to provide opportunities to get to know each other better, to learn more about the people surrounding the University, and to make the community a bit better for their presence.
The grant from CavFutures helped bring Bennett’s dream to life. We knew that if we built a space, people would come. Our accessible treehouse opened earlier this year and we wanted to celebrate with our community. We wanted to share the excitement and explore together not just the treehouse, but the other improvements to the space we helped create with the City of Charlottesville and the family of Josie Klotz: the accessible path behind the treehouse and the renovated bathrooms with the first universal changing table in our community. We wanted to have a Party to celebrate. A Party in the Park. But putting on a party for 1000 people takes months of planning, creativity, and, dollars—dollars to provide cooling tents, dollars to provide craft supplies and balloon animals, dollars to reach parts of the community not already connected to our project. And that’s where the funding from the Champions of the Community grant made a difference.
It wasn’t just the money that made an impact though—it was the student athletes themselves, joining us as part of the Charlottesville area community. At the Party in the Park, UVA student athletes played ball side by side on the fields with the children as well as sitting down with families at a craft table to explore and build together. Kids who admired the student athletes. Kids who had never heard of the student athletes. Community members who may not have been exposed to the stars behind the University’s sports program other than what they read about online or saw on television. And it gave the student athletes the chance to meet members of the community that they might not have otherwise met in the classroom or on the field.
Because he could not always get to the spaces and places he wanted, Bennett had this innate ability to draw people in, to create a community around him. And that’s what we are trying to do at Pen Park. To create a space that is different from traditional spaces where not all are welcome, to create a space that says, this is a place for everyone, for all of us—together.
When I looked around on April 27th at our Party in the Park, my heart was full to nearly bursting. I saw Bennett’s dream come to life. I had hoped a few hundred folks would show up. Instead, we had a thousand people of all ages and abilities, families and friends, community organizations dedicated to inclusive play, coworkers and classmates, strangers and teammates, coming together in community and play. There were those who used walkers and canes to get around, those who used wheelchairs, those who used their feet. There were service dogs. There were non-verbal members of our community, dancing and grooving next to folks who used traditional speech. All backgrounds, multiple generations, spread throughout the space…and the student athletes through their grant dollars and through their physical presence, helped make Bennett’s vision come true.
It took a village to love and care for Bennett. It took doctors and nurses, physical and occupational therapists, teachers and nursing students and family members and friends all coming together. And the same is true with the space that we are creating, to take his dream and carry it forward. It takes a village, a community coming together–Partnerships with state and local officials, grant-making organizations and foundations, city planners and landscape architects and civil engineers. It takes partnerships with community organizations, and it takes individuals and families, businesses and the university saying, Everybody deserves a place to play.
When it comes to play and to being welcomed into a community, nobody wants to sit on the sidelines. Our job is to identify the barriers, and to work together to figure out how to lower them. Every step we take toward inclusive play is inspired by Bennett’s spirit and the community that surrounded him while he was physically with us and the community he continues to inspire with his story today. We are so grateful for the support of Cav Futures and we honor all of the awardees here today who are daily answering the question, ‘What can I do to make our community a more inclusive place? To live, to work, to learn, to play?”
Thank you.