Community Without an Age Limit: A Conversation with Samia Khan, Founder of KEEN UVA
Part of Every Kid Can's ongoing interview series, where we speak with professionals, advocates, and educators who work alongside people with disabilities every day — to better understand the barriers they face and how youth can be part of the solution.
Every Kid Can spoke with Samia Khan, founder of KEEN UVA: the first campus chapter of KEEN (Kids Enjoy Exercise Now), a national nonprofit offering free recreational activities for children and young adults with disabilities.
What Does KEEN UVA Do?
KEEN operates as a loose network of independently run chapters, and Khan was quick to point out that no two look quite alike: each one takes shape around the community it serves and the resources available to it. At UVA, that's meant building close partnerships with Charlottesville Parks and Recreation, the local YMCA, and area clinics, largely because trust with families doesn't come automatically to a young organization. "It's hard to get families to fully trust you, especially since we're a new organization," Khan said.
One choice she's especially proud of sets KEEN UVA apart from many sister chapters: there's no upper age limit. While plenty of KEEN programs taper off once participants reach their early twenties, UVA's chapter continues serving people well beyond that. "We don't believe the care should stop at any age," she said — a small structural decision that reflects a broader philosophy: support isn't a service with an expiration date, but an ongoing relationship.
Khan didn't set out to run a nonprofit chapter. She got involved with KEEN's New York chapter about two years before starting the UVA branch, and the experience stuck with her enough that she wanted to bring it to her own campus. What followed was mostly administrative grind — drafting a full constitution, defining the group's governance, recruiting an executive board — much of which she handled solo before her friends stepped in as her first officers the following spring. It's a reminder that a lot of advocacy work doesn't look glamorous up close; it looks like paperwork, meetings, and momentum built slowly over time.
The Barriers That Remain
Khan said the chapter hasn't run into major roadblocks directly, crediting that partly to how deliberately KEEN UVA screens its volunteers. The chapter requires students to apply rather than simply sign up, a filter Khan uses to separate genuine interest from resume-building. She cited a number that's stuck with her: 150 students signed up for KEEN at the university's involvement fair, but only around 30 showed up to the first meeting. "I want KEEN to be people that actually want to be here," she said, "that actually want to help."
That gap points to a broader challenge many youth-led disability organizations face — not necessarily resistance or hostility, but a shallower kind of interest that doesn't always translate into consistent, reliable involvement. Building a chapter that lasts, in Khan's view, means being selective enough that the people who do show up can actually be counted on.
How We Can Do Better
Khan's advice was simple: "Just be good to people and always be welcoming." She's someone who tries to avoid conflict and lead with kindness as a general rule, not just within KEEN, and she's found that approach compounds — the relationships she's built through the organization have opened doors well outside of it. As a pre-med student, she was able to shadow at a clinic this past summer specifically because of a connection made by reaching out through KEEN. "It really does get you far," she said, "just knowing how to network."
It's advice that doubles as a quiet argument for why this kind of work matters beyond the immediate service it provides: the relationships built through consistent, genuine involvement tend to open doors in directions volunteers don't always expect going in.
The conversation closed on what's next rather than what's finished. Every Kid Can is now looking into helping KEEN chapters closer to home, hoping a similar kind of partnership might take root between two youth-led organizations working from different campuses toward the same goal.