The highly anticipated Special Olympics Festival has become one of the city's most popular (and unique!) fundraisers.
The Festival is one of SONL's major fundraisers every year and our Board of Directors and Festival Committee work extremely hard to ensure that every one has a fantastic time at this event!
The Sponsor Luncheon, which takes place at the Clovelly Gazebo, is a way to connect our sponsors to our athletes with our fun Athlete's Parade, athlete co-host, Mark Peddle and athlete speaker.
This year's athlete speaker will be young athlete Tyler Collett and his mom, Colleen.
Tyler Collett started with Special Olympics in our Young Athletes program where he began learning the fundamental movement skills of running, jumping, catching, throwing, kicking and striking. He has grown tremendously within the last number of years being involved with Special Olympics program. Tyler is now 13 years old and is a member of the St. John’s club where he participates in basketball, swimming, and curling. He has taken the fundamental movement skills he learned in the young athletes programs and transferred them into excellent sports skills. Tyler is also pleased to have met many friends within Special Olympics – so pleased that last year for a school speech he wrote about his experiences in Special Olympics. We look forward to watching Tyler grow as an athlete and as a person over the coming years while participating in our programs.
Colleen, Tyler’s mom, has watched her son become more active and social while participating in Special Olympics. She fully realized the benefits of our the programs when Tyler got involved with the St. John’s swim program. While Tyler had tried swimming with other programs in the past; he really excelled in learning the necessary water safety and swimming strokes within the Special Olympics program. Colleen credits this to the many great volunteers that Special Olympics has involved with our programs. She says that the volunteers are there because they truly care about the athletes and want to make a difference in their lives. Colleen has gone on to recruit many new families to the Special Olympics movement and has even joined the St. John’s committee as a busy volunteer to ensure that the word about Special Olympics spreads and that the club is moving forward with a new generation of young athletes.