Turning Pain Into Purpose: Shannon Feaster's Journey of Advocacy and Legacy

Welcome to the Legacy All Stars podcast where we talk to successful individuals in their respective fields who do things to help others and make an impact for the greater good. Here is your host, Alan Pavloski.

Welcome to the Legacy All Stars podcast where we shine a light on extraordinary individuals using their platforms to make a difference in the world. I'm your host, Alan Pavloski, and today we are honored to have an incredible, incredible guest who embodies strength, leadership and service. Shanna Feaster is a respected sports executive whose career has spanned leadership roles with organizations like women's professional racquetball. She has also worked with athletes across the NBA, NFL, and other sports. But beyond her professional success, Shannon's heart and energy are deeply rooted in purpose. She is the driving force behind Savvy's Army, a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising awareness, providing education, and driving research for pediatric cancer. This organization was inspired by her daughter Savvy Redmond's recent medical journey. Shannon's transition from the boardroom to the battlefield of advocacy is one of resilience, courage, and legacy. Today we'll explore how her experience in the sports world shaped her voice and leadership in the nonprofit space, what it means to fight for a cause so close to home, and how we can all be part of something bigger ourselves. Shannon, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, Alan.

Yeah, thank you for being here. So first, I want to start with your personal journey. Can you start by sharing the story of Savvy and what led to the founding of Savvy's Army?

Sure. Savvy is my youngest daughter. She is four years younger than my eldest, Riley. Sa.

Was a huge athlete advocate even at the tender ages of 6 and 7 years old. When she was about 7, just before her 7th birthday, we got a call from her camp counselor who said that she wouldn't be able to continue the activities of the camp that summer day because she was complaining of some hip pain and that was a bit alarming, but I thought maybe she jumped off the monkey bars. This is a very active child and just injured herself. She'll be fine. I'll go pick her up and there won't be any ache issue. But the situation did not get better. Her pain got worse. Even giving her a little over the counter medication overnight. The next morning she was in even worse pain. So I said, well, you know, it wouldn't hurt just to call her pediatrician and get it checked out in case she broke something or, you know, stress fracture. We got an appointment very quickly, fortunately, and was told that the Blood work came back. She did an X ray and blood work. Her pediatrician came back. Not normal inflammation. So she wanted her to go see a rheumatologist, thinking that it probably was arthritis. And so something that we could solve for, we could work through.

An appointment within a week with a rheumatologist at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Savvy's dad is an army veteran and got some pretty quick results that were very surprising. And what we were told was that the rheumatologist had consulted with an oncologist who was on duty that same day and wanted him to take a look at the results of the X rays and the blood work and the ultrasound. And that senior oncologist said, hey, I need to let you all know that this looks like something a lot more serious than what we initially suspected. And that's when we were told that it looked like neuroblastoma, which is a cancer that affects the nerve cell groupings in the body and is usually diagnosed before the age of two. And so at this point, Savvy's again just shy of her seventh birthday. So very alarmed, didn't know what that meant, obviously floored by it and devastated at the same time. So she never left. She did not leave Walter Reed. She was transferred to the inpatient side pretty quickly after that. And then she stayed there for 15 days for evaluation. Lots of other scans and blood work, some consultations between the team there and the children's oncology group, and just to confirm the diagnosis, but also to identify the stage, which ended up being stage four. So world completely rocked on that day in July of 2022.

Right. It had to have been devastating and scary. What was going through your heart and mind when your family was faced with the diagnosis?

The shock, I think took a while to wear off, but mainly we were trying to make sure that Savvy wasn't sensing how incredibly scared we were because we'd never known another child.

Who had cancer. Just never wasn't something that we had heard about in our family. Certainly not this type, even, you know, amongst my network of friends who kind of have worked in this space. So just really shocked and just trying to work through all of the different steps that you need to take to understand where you need to go from here and the decision making process that would be facing us.

Right. How has this personal journey transformed your perspective on advocacy, community and legacy? I know you've done a lot already, but this must have really changed your perspective.

Certainly did. The first thing that I needed to do was to stop working. So my business was called Athletes aid and still exists, but that was all about athlete promotion and legacy building. So I was already in the doing that kind of work. And having been a professional athlete before, racquetball player and then commissioner of that tour, I knew how important it was to speak up and speak out about issues that you might not think anybody else understands or is going through or can help you make a connection that will support your journey. But, you know, we just kind of had to. Had to do that. We let folks in the racquetball community know here in the, in the DMV and dc, Maryland, Virginia area what was happening, because we knew we were going to need a level of support not only for Savvy and to try to understand if anyone else had ever encountered neuroblastoma or pediatric rare pediatric cancer, but also for our other daughter, Riley. Because as much as it was changing life for Savvy and for her dad and me, Riley was completely turned upside down. Her world was turned upside down. Not having her sister available to her and not having us be able to provide answers about what the future will hold.

Wow. I mean, you've had executive positions in some of the top organizations in sports. I mean, how did that experience prepare you to lead this new space of nonprofit and advocacy work? Sure.

I think having worked with so many athletes who've endured career ending injuries all the way to, you know, loss of family members and friends, maybe not through a diagnosis like cancer, but whatever the case may be, resiliency is a theme. Just being able to lean on each other is important. And as a leadership, as a leader, one of the core values that I have is leading with love is compassion. And so I know for me, I probably didn't look like what I was going through. And that is the case for so many athletes and leaders that you have no idea what life is thrown at a person until you actually ask. And so you actually pick up on some of those cues. If you're compassionate, you'll kind of check in from time to time. And if you're a leader, you know your athlete. As commissioner of the racquetball tour for five and a half years, I got to know my athletes. And so if something was bothering them, typically I'd be able to sense that folks aren't necessarily going to come out and tell you outright that, hey, I'm going through personally, you know, a journey or a family member is, a friend is. And so for me, leading with love and compassion has really helped me to Open up the same way that I would want for my athletes to do and friends to do with me. So I've just decided that, you know, I'm gonna. I'm gonna talk about this because it's painful and. And folks are wondering where I am. You know, I've had to kind of shutter my business, at least temporarily, to make sure that my family's okay. And so there were a lot of questions. Where is Shannon? Why did she drop off, you know, the face of the earth? You know, all the social media interactions that I would have, I would. I just was not present. And so they knew something's going on. And so I decided, hey, let me tell a few close friends within this community and then within my work space what's happening. And I'm going to trust them to kind of fan this information out. And maybe something will come in while we're trying to get our balance back, trying to get our footing back as a family, maybe we can kind of lean on folks, a support system, and they can help us out. So I think vulnerability is important in this space because if you don't have a network of other advocates who care about similar things or who maybe are learning about a particular issue for the first time, then how are you going to ever get those connections to work to benefit that cause?

You know, I've had a lot of conversations with athlete friends of mine and, you know, vulnerability is not their strong suit, typically. And so how were you able to just tough it up and get ready to be vulnerable in a sense that you were an athlete yourself and you've had exposure to athletes that just need to put their game face on. What enabled you to convince yourself and your family to be vulnerable about this?

Personally, just leading by example, I asked that of my athletes. And so I had to take a good, hard look at myself and just say, hey.

You'Re going to cry a lot. You know, you're going to suffer a lot. That's part of this journey. You've been given a heads up about this from the doctors, nurses, everyone involved. And so the more I bottle it up, the more I knew I wouldn't be able to help myself or Savvy or her sister or anybody else in my family. And so I also was able to release sort of that burden and empower my family members to share as well. Because if one thing that I actually noticed during this journey with Savvy was that, and I never noticed it before until we were going through it, and she would have good days and a lot of bad Days when she. Even when she was out of the hospital, you know, some days were up, some days were. Were down. She was going through chemotherapy. She had gone through immunotherapy, stem cell transplant, photon proton radiation. You name it, she went through it. And she was living with a metaphor in her chest. So there were activities, most sports, she could not participate in. So what I was able to consider for the first time was how few children we see outside who have cancer, who have no hair, who are in the throes of treatment. But a good day, being able to get outside is an opportunity for them to live their lives, even if it's just for a couple of days or an hour. And so Savvy never wanted to be inside if she was out of the hospital. She was not on the inpatient side of the hospital. She wanted to be outside in the world. She actually did not want to wear a wig. She rarely wanted to wear a hat. And so it shined a light for me, bright light on what resiliency and strength and, you know, courage and all of that really, truly means, because she knew she'd be looked at. She knew that the questions would come, and it forced me to prepare her. As we're going to the playground, as we're walking down the street, and she's riding her scooter without anything more than, you know, she might have a helmet or a hat or what have you, but people will look, people will stare, people will make comments, and, you know, that that's just kind of part of life. So preparing her at the age of seven or eight for those unfortunate kind of experiences was part of this journey that I don't think anybody truly appreciates or, you know, understands until they've gone through it or they know a child or even an adult who's f. Who's faced this, where it's an obvious change. And so the questions come, and I had to get comfortable answering those questions in front of her and kind of modeling that for her for sure.

What are some of the biggest challenges you've encountered in raising awareness around pediatric cancer?

The lack of awareness is astonishing. I think many of us have seen over the years, and fortunately, more so in the last six months, at least here in my region, the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital commercials. So from time to time, big fundraising stretches, you'll see those commercials come up, and even Shriners, you'll see these commercials, but you don't see enough of the statistics. You don't hear people talking about how much more prevalent childhood cancer is than what they've ever been told or could possibly understand unless it's affected them. The fact that 15,000 children and adolescents in the US between the ages of newborn infant 0 to 19 will be diagnosed with cancer this year, 1 in 5 won't make it. The late diagnosis trend that we have going is unacceptable because the pain and the suffering is not deserved by these children or their families. And then we also know about the lack of research funding. Less than 4% of all federal funding is going toward pediatric cancer research. How can we find a cure for any of these cancers if we're not supporting the research and development?

I mean, early detection you talked about, that's gotta be a push. We gotta do better than what we're doing now.

Absolutely. And if folks are aware that something that might seem like a nagging injury that an adolescent might sustain just from playing outside truly could be something else, it means that you have to go to the doctor regularly and have those baseline levels of their, you know, their blood work done so that if there's inflammation, if there are these spikes and these challenges that they're facing, that it's detected pretty early to your point, and then a specialist referral can occur. Savi was definitely not expected to survive beyond a year, probably more like a six month diagnosis. We had her for 21 months, nearly two years. We enrolled her in a clinical trial at memorial Sloan Kettering in New York. I moved to New York with savvy for that period of time. She hit a very nice, you know, she had a remission, she was in remission. And then she. She had a nice stretch where we were like, we can move back to Maryland and we can give her her life, you know, let her set her goals, and we can pursue those with some maintenance monitoring by Walter Reed. And they stayed in touch with Memorial Sloan Kettering. And also she was treated by folks at the children's hospital of Philadelphia as well. So we had all that coordination going on daily. They were in touch because it's such a rare type of cancer.

Yeah, yeah. Can you speak to the power of community, both in sports and through Savvy's army, and how people have stepped up in ways that surprised you or inspired you?

Yes, absolutely. I think once folks were made aware, both within the racquetball community, throughout my sports and athlete network and beyond, once they were made aware of what our family's journey was and the shock wore off, that it could happen to somebody. They know.

The amount, the outpouring of support, the what can we do? How can we Help. We know these folks who might be able to host a fundraiser or we've got. Beyond the donations, the individual donations, just the interest in this issue has been very heartening for us, and it won't stop. And that's one of the reasons why.

We just needed to launch Savvy's army, because Savvy, as I mentioned earlier, she was an athlete, activist herself. I mean, this kid wouldn't want anybody to suffer in any way for any reason. Animals she cared a little bit more about than people. So she wanted to be a veterinarian when she grew up. And a couple of the program areas that we focused on are based on her specific interest in supporting other children like her, whether they have cancer or another serious illness and require accessing, you know, blood work being done or medication being administered through a port. She wanted to provide this needle relieving device to as many kids as possible. It's called the Buzzy. A buzzy device. And it just vibrates. And you put it between the brain and the pains, and the needle injection site is where the pain is, and put it in between there, and it really, really helped her. And so one of the first opportunities we had for partnership, for truly meaningful partnership through Savvy's army was with the maker of Buzzy, which is pain care labs down in Atlanta. And they locked arms with us and they said, hey, let's do this. Let us provide you with Buzzy devices to give to the Mid Atlantic hospitals that treated Savmian. Let's scale from there. Let's help as many kids as we can and as many families as we can, because they gotta. They've got to be accessed and they have to receive their treatment, but they don't have to endure the amount of pain that needle, you know, that injections cause. And we think, you know, getting a flu shot or, you know, back when those. Those who do get vaccinated, those needle pricks, nobody likes to have those, but when you're accessed multiple times a week for years, that's a really, really devastating situation. Yeah, that's just one of the. One of the program goals that we have.

When you think about legacy that you're building both professionally and personally, what does that word mean to you now?

Now it means activate as soon as possible. It means that.

For me, whatever I do professionally moving forward will involve the support, care, help of others, and in particular in this space, pediatric cancer awareness, research funding. In any way that I can help families like ours. I will be doing that as well as making money, you know, to pay the bills. But this is super important to me, and it has provided me an outlet for the pain. So it's now my passion, and, of course, it's become my purpose as well.

Yeah, it's wonderful. What's next for savvy's army? And how can our listeners get involved, support the mission, or spread awareness?

Yep. Savvy's army, as I mentioned, will scale the buzzy program out. So beyond the mid Atlantic hospitals that treated savvy, we've identified 10 additional clinics and hospitals that we're going to support the delivery of these buzzy devices. So that's number one. Number two, we are launching, and we're really close to being able to announce the Savvy E. Redmond love and light scholarship fund, which initially will support a student or students with particular needs based on their financial situation, but also if they need special access or accommodations. And it's. We're going to start that at Savvy's elementary school, which is St. John's Episcopal School in only Maryland. And we will provide a scholarship fund to that school and that again, they'll be launching next school year as we already in the throes of it, and then we're going to expand that out. Savvy wanted to be a veteran, a veterinarian. So these schools of veterinary medicine in particular that she was focused on, I want to get a scholarship program up and running for students who want to be veterinarians as well. And then we have a third pillar to this, and that is around healing connections with horses. Savvy was extremely fond of horses. She loved unicorns at first. And then she said, mommy, I'm growing up. I guess I got to find something that other people believe in as well. And so we were able to take her to the stables here locally, where. Where I am in Fulton, Maryland, called Encore. And this wonderful group of ladies invited her to come whenever she was able, and they would send her pictures when she wasn't, pictures and videos of the horses there that caring for. And so it really, really helped her move through each and every treatment, each and every appointment. And so we want to create an online destination for children who are inpatient in particular, so they can talk to each other, but also they can experience the healing power of horses through our portal. So that's a little bit more of a longer lead. But if they want to support any of those activities that we're. That we're doing right now or in the future, they can just go to savvysarmy.org S A V I S A R M Y.org.

That'S inspiring. I'm so impressed with your poise and I always have been, even before any of this went down. But you've always had a tremendous amount of poise. I appreciate that about you.

Thank you.

What advice would you give others who are looking to use their platform and sometimes their pain and their personal anguish, whether in sports or elsewhere, for a cause that matters?

The advice I give is, you know, lead with your heart. So if it's something that you want to be doing for decades, for the rest of your life, you got to kind of search your soul about. Doesn't have to be that there's something devastating that just smacks you in your face. It can be something that you've been thinking about over the years, something that maybe a loved one is going through, something that touched you, a story that you heard. And maybe that's a way for you to at least give back and to be able to even endure some of the ups and downs in your own life is that if you are leading with love and you've got a passion for a particular area or issue, go for it. And again, I've heard other guests on your show because your show is amazing. Talk about how you don't have to start your own thing. There's so many organizations that are doing great work and the partnership aspect is what allows for us to make the biggest impact more quickly, you know, so connecting, connecting with each other, connecting the dots and doing what you can. A lot of folks can't just start up their own organization and in this case ours is a project of United Charitable, which is a fantastic 501C3 based in Virginia. And what they do is provide all of the wraparound services so I don't have to hire folks.

Fiscal sponsorship model is tremendous. It's amazing. I've. I've used it myself and I feel very strongly that people should really consider that. So I really believe that you're on the right track there. You don't have to create that infrastructure where you're starting from scratch. And that's wonderful. I did think about one more question before we end. And what I'm really focused on is, you know, how can. And look, you may not know this, I don't think I've really shared this with you, but about seven years ago, my wife and I co founded a nature based preschool in Northern California.

I did not know that.

We serve hundreds of families on helping their children learn through nature.

So I'm involved in the early education business as well. And I. I really am inspired to question how can we make an impact on the early detection aspects? And what do you think you'd recommend for people that see this show or that have access to hearing this message of what to look for and how you can get that early detection opportunity?

I think first and foremost, getting your kids out in nature, getting kids outside, is the most healing, powerful, most powerful thing ever. We underestimate that. And whether you live in Alaska or you live in Florida, it doesn't matter. Connecting kids with nature is, you know, something that I underestimated myself but that I now realize is super, super important. I think also getting kids out to play in different environments, different settings, being able to kind of learn how to survive, too. I think we've become so connected to technology and so disconnected then from what it is that allows for us to be our most healthy selves, that we need to teach the younger generations a little bit more about that. And so I'm so proud of what you and your wife are doing. I think that is fantastic. And more of us need to be supporting that as well in our communities.

Thank you, Shannon. Thank you so much for being here. Your unwavering commitment to making the world a better place is incredibly inspiring to me. You've shown courage and purpose aren't reserved for the few. They're available to anyone willing to show up and serve and in the face of adversity as well. So I really applaud you on that. So thank you very much.

Thank you for having me. I'm appreciative of the opportunity to talk about Savvy and Savvy's Army.

Yeah. To our listeners, thank you for tuning in. If this conversation inspired you, which I can't imagine it would not, share it with somebody who needs a little spark today. And remember, legacy isn't built in a single day. It's built in how you live each day with purpose. Until next time, keep building your legacy.