The Superhero Project creates personalized cartoon crusaders for disabled, chronically ill youth 

Sometimes superheroes aren’t on television or in the movies but living and walking among us unnoticed. 

For the past 10 years, The Superhero Project (SHP), a nonprofit organization based in Chagrin Falls, has enabled more than 2,000 youth to envision their inner superhero. They help young people between ages 2 and 19 from 28 countries who are facing serious illnesses, disabilities and complex medical or mental health needs. 

Working with professional artists, the children and their families communicate the characteristics of the child’s super character, including their superpowers and tools they can employ to combat their illness or condition and make the world a better place. They can also describe their sidekicks, either imaginary or real, such as their parents, siblings, doctors, nurses, teachers and so on. The artist then draws their alter-ego and presents the child with a framed poster.

“We now have around 800 artists from 41 countries who have voluntarily participated from every continent except for Antarctica,” said Lisa Kollins, founder and executive director of SHP. “We’re working on finding someone from Antarctica, too, because having an artist standing on the frozen ground holding a poster for a kid would just be a fun milestone for us to have all seven continents.”

This summer, from June 25 through June 28, local superheroes and their families and super supporters will gather to celebrate Super Hero Weekend at Cibik’s Dairy Island ice cream store in Chagrin Falls. 

“The Cibik’s recently celebrated their 50^th year owning and operating Dairy Island, and they’ve been big supporters of The Superhero Project,” Kollins said. “Every night there will be something different going on, in addition to the ice cream, so they will have music, some other nonprofits will be there, games for kids, and we’ll have a family night. In the past we’ve had the Chagrin Falls Fire Department truck or the Chagrin Falls High School marching band.”

Dairy Island will donate a percentage of the sales during that weekend and will match it with their own donation. Additionally, all summer long they donate 20% of the proceeds from the entry fees for Dairy Island’s “Create Your Own Ice Cream” competition to SHP.

For the competition, people propose different ice cream combinations and sundaes, and then the winner of that competition receives free ice cream for the entirety of the following summer.

SHP’s origin story

For nine summers, Kollins worked as a cabin counselor and program specialist at Camp Sunrise, which for 24 years was the only camp in Ohio for kids impacted by HIV and AIDS.

“Every summer, there was a different theme, and every year, I tried to find something unique to bring to the campers,” recalled Kollins who grew up in Las Vegas, but moved to Cleveland in 1998. “Most of them were from relatively modest means or under-resourced neighborhoods, and it was important to me that they get to experience new things.”

A couple summers, she brought in scuba divers to teach the kids about scuba in the swimming pool. Another year, the theme was “Up, Up and Away,” and Kollins had hot air balloons fly in so the campers could take tethered balloon rides. 

In 2016, Kollins had the idea to take campers on a more reflective journey.  

“One year the theme was about finding their inner superhero,” she said. “I had the idea for a one-time camp memory piece that we could interview the kids the first day of camp to find out who they were and what kind of superhero they’d like to be and then surprise them the last day of camp with a picture of themselves drawn by an artist.”

She reached out to roughly 40 Ohio artists who were happy to help but knew she needed many more. She contacted a high school friend, Tim Yoon, who was an animation producer at Netflix in Los Angeles at that time. 

Yoon enlisted another 50 artists who all agreed to volunteer their time to obtain information about their assigned camper one day and three days later send back a fully realized digital image that Kollins had printed and framed.

When she saw the amazement and delight of the campers at the closing event as they watched the slideshow of their inner heroes come to life, Kollins realized she had unwittingly piloted the template for SHP. 

“I was floored by the way these artists had somehow captured the image of our campers’ strength, spunk, charm and creativity,” she said.  “Watching the kids see themselves as superheroes was incredibly powerful, and the whole room erupted in cheers, laughter and applause, and many of us counselors were a little misty-eyed seeing all of the joy in the room.”

Kollins knew she had stumbled into something that was unique and meaningful and thought it was a shame to have it be a one-and-done effort. Then many of the artists who had participated began encouraging her to make the endeavor a permanent project. 

Taking SHP live

In 2017, Kollins contacted University Hospitals’ Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital (RB&C). Although they weren’t quite sure of what she envisioned for the children, the hospital allowed her to start interviewing patients in the pediatric and adolescent oncology and hematology units.

“At the same time, I started a little website and the social media, and as soon as people started seeing and hearing about what I was doing with the kids, I began getting requests from people outside the hospital,” she said. “Then I was invited to a couple of community events, and started getting requests for families outside of Cleveland, then outside of Ohio, then ultimately outside of the country, so I just kept expanding.”

In 2020, an angel donor presented Kollins with a check for $50,000. At that time, printers were donating the cost of printing, and the hospital covered the shipping charges to send the super kids posters to the patients, so she didn’t have a lot of expenses.

She was also working full time at Case Western Reserve University as the administrator of the Social Justice Institute, and then her last couple years, as the administrator of the Schubert Center for Child Studies.

“Our angel said see what you can do with some money, but you’ll either need to find a fiscal sponsor or become a nonprofit,” Kollins explained. “In the back of my mind I thought this could really be something one day, but I was working at CWRU, and I wouldn’t have taken that step forward without that push. So, at the end of 2020, we became a legal nonprofit.”

She then needed to consider finding a way to keep SHP sustainable as an organization, and quickly realized trying to run it on nights, weekends and during long lunch hours wasn’t the answer. In December 2021, Kollins left CWRU and focused on SHP full-time.

Superheroes everywhere

Tatiana Mendez, mother of 8-year-old superhero Isaiah in Cleveland, said SHP did “an awesome job” for her son, who was 3 at the time.

Their assigned artist Cherry Mo drew Isaiah in a superhero costume designed with items he loves such as his favorite, little goldfish, along with their dog. The poster includes his parents together holding hands and holding his older brother’s hand. 

“It was beautiful,” Mendez said. “It gave our family a lot of support with still being new to Isaiah’s Down syndrome diagnosis, and it was nice to know these resources were available for not only him, but any type of disability. They do all of these nice things to show that the child is not what their diagnosis is. They are their own person.” 

Representing the artist’s perspective, Joshua Thompson, vice president of marketing at Oodle creative agency in Cincinnati, Ohio, and SHP board president, said working on the posters is a blast. 

“The creativity of a child is boundless,” said Thompson, who’s now drawn about 40 posters. “It is sometimes bizarre, and they will have some strange requests, but my goal is to say, if this kid wants two different colors of plaid, they’re getting two different colors of plaid. They want a bubble gun? Cool. We’ll make a bubble gun. It’s really fun because with these kids, there’s no limit.” 

Since the first project with patients and families at RB&C, Kollins has brought SHP to hospitals in multiple cities. Currently, SHP is partnering with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Kollins has also made SHP available to children in foster care. A conversation with a social worker she worked with at the Cuyahoga County Department of Child and Family Care Services revealed how those youth often have trouble looking ahead because they have immediate concerns such as where are they going to live and who their family will be.

“The SHP poster serves as a reminder for them to look to the future and gives them a physical, visual representation of them as strong, beautiful and powerful,” Kollins explained. “It gives them some of that power back that they may feel has been stripped away.”

Benefits for the children and their families

The superhero poster image gives families and caregivers a tool to use to foster resilience when a child is facing a challenge, whether that’s an academic challenge or a medical procedure. They can say, “Which of your superpowers are you going to call on in this moment?,” and “Who are the sidekicks who will help you get through?” so that they remember that they have a team around them. 

It builds feelings of connection between the artist and the kids, who have a little bit of a pen-pal relationship, because SHP invites the artists to send notes to the kids that are delivered with the posters, and often the families write a note to the artist. 

Finally, it brings feelings of hope because the kids and families know there are kind, talented people around the world who are wishing them well and joining them in their child’s journey.

“The image provides families a tangible way to say to the community that this is how we see our child, and this is a way that we want you to see our child,” Kollins said. “Hopefully, it will bridge some of that isolation that they’re feeling when people are so worried about saying the wrong thing that they don’t say anything at all, so families feel alone in whatever they are going through.”

SHP board member Lisa Merio, Ph.D., a clinical child pediatric psychologist in Gainesville, Florida, said there are multiple reasons why The Superhero Project can have a big effect on families by giving them a new way to tell their story. 

“For some of the families, going through this process is an inflection point where it’s the first time that they and their child have the opportunity to be seen and understood and celebrated in the way that we want all kids to feel,” she said. “Many of the parents look back on opening their poster as a turning point that gives their child a new way to think and talk about themselves, and it opens up new opportunities for them to move forward in a healthy and positive way.”

Occasionally, there can be a bittersweet aspect to the posters for the approximately 100 posters that have become lasting memorial pieces for families whose child has died. They may keep the poster on display in the child’s room or somewhere in their home.

“One of the most rewarding parts is also the hardest, which is when families who have lost their kids reach out to let us know,” Kollins said. “The fact that they feel that we are a significant enough part of their child’s journey is an incredible honor and humbling.” 

New heroes program

In 2025, after several years of research and planning, Kollins launched SHP’s newest initiative: “Heroes Within,” with the primary focus of supporting LGBTQ+ youth.

After lining up the funding, however, everything changed in January 2025, with the presidential administration’s new laws, regulations and funding cuts regarding diversity and LGBTQ+ initiatives. 

Kollns went back to her advisors in the community asking whether this was the best time to launch such a program while the LGBTQ+ community faced existential issues and significantly reduced funding.

“They all said ‘Yes, this is exactly the time we need an initiative like this because we want to celebrate, and queer joy is a form of resistance,’” she said.

The LGBTQ+ youth Kollins engaged at a focus group from Q You, a teen program at the LGBT Community Center of Greater Cleveland, unanimously agreed: “This program could save lives!”

Kollins and her team interviewed roughly 40 youth, mostly from Ohio but also other states, to match them with an artist who identified as queer. 

Thus far, “Heroes Within” exhibit has been displayed eight times in Ohio, Oregon, Washington and most recently New York.

Interested families should email Kollins at hello@SHPkids.org or learn more and fill out the family contact page on SHP’s website. Artists interested in contributing posters should review the artists contact page.