Kathryn & Savannah’s Story

Kathryn Phillips and her daughter, Savannah “Savy,” have a different experience with Runway for Recovery than almost anyone else.

Kathryn was one of the first Models to walk the Runway in 2007, dancing in honor of her mother, Susan, who had passed away from metastatic breast cancer. Three years later, Kathryn returned to the Runway while navigating breast cancer herself, this time with three-year-old Savy beside her.

For Kathryn, Runway became a community she would remain deeply connected to for the next two decades. For Savy, it was simply part of growing up.

“I was raised in a world where cancer wasn’t uncomfortable,” Savy says. “I always knew that I had people there for me.”

Nearly twenty years later, Savy can see just how much that shaped her. “Everyone knows that Runway made me who I am.”

That perspective came into focus in a new way at the Runway Show in New York City. Surrounded by younger children whose families had found their way to Runway, Savy realized that her place within the community had changed.

“I’ve met so many Runway kiddos,” she says. “I felt like a Runway adult.”

For Kathryn, watching that shift has been equally meaningful. The community that once wrapped its arms around her own young daughter is now something Savy can help extend to the next generation.

“You’re giving it back to this next set of people,” Kathryn says. There is something especially powerful, she explains, about watching a child—or even a young adult in her twenties—find the kind of community that she and Savy were fortunate enough to have.

“People don’t realize that you need the support until you get it,” Savy says.

Over the years, Kathryn and Savy have watched that support take countless forms. Sometimes it is a family finding financial relief during an unimaginably difficult time. But just as often, it is something harder to quantify: children finding other children who understand them, families forming friendships, and people discovering a place where they do not have to explain what they have been through.

Kathryn calls it being “part of the hug.”

She sees it in children like Jonah and Finn, who immediately connect to the Runway community because they are looking for exactly that kind of belonging. She sees it in the pink pumpkins that once greeted families at Runway events—something whimsical and joyful that can immediately make a young child feel that she has entered a place filled with love.

And Savy sees it in the moments that happen around the Runway itself.

At the first New York City show, she stood at the end of the runway and found herself unexpectedly emotional as she watched children and families experience this community for the first time. She remembers watching Jonah and Lisa on the Runway, with the boys cheering them on, and realizing how extraordinary it was to see another generation becoming part of something that had been so formative in her own life.

“Once you’re in, you’re in for life,” Savy says.

Kathryn remembers that New York show for another reason: watching Savy surrounded by so many different parts of her life and seeing her worlds collide. She said that Savy told her at the end of the evening, "it simply was one of the greatest days and nights of my life."

But after nearly two decades of Runway Shows, some of the moments that stay with them most have very little to do with what happens onstage.

They happen backstage. In the hallways. Even in the women’s bathroom.

They are the moments when someone pulls you into a hug because they understand without needing an explanation. Savy describes walking into the backstage room of a Runway Show people and feeling both a “deep hug” and a “deep exhale.”

It is the feeling of being completely known and completely welcomed.

For Kathryn, that is the core of Runway: the deep connections between families and the knowledge that those relationships do not end when a grant is distributed or a Runway Show is over. Families become part of the community and, in so many cases, remain part of it for a lifetime.

Kathryn and Savy are perhaps the clearest example of that promise.

Twenty years ago, they were a family being held by this community. Today, Kathryn spends her days helping ensure families navigating metastatic breast cancer and loss receive that same care, while Savy gets to watch younger Runway kids grow up surrounded by the kind of love that shaped her.

And perhaps that is what twenty years of Runway looks like: the people who were once wrapped in the hug growing up, turning around, and extending their arms to the families coming next.