About Us
El Sol De Sylvia Foundation was born from a deeply personal story — and a belief in the power of sport to change lives.
Founded in 2025 by Cassandra Cunningham, alongside her husband, former athletes, and a community of supporters, the foundation exists to create access to opportunity through sport. Inspired by Cassandra's mother, Anna Sylvia Cunningham, El Sol De Sylvia carries forward a legacy of resilience, light, and transformation.
Our Story
Our Founder Cassandra Cunningham has spent more than 30 years as an athlete, national team rower, and coach, working with student-athletes at the youth, collegiate, and national levels. Along the way, she worked with young people facing violence, poverty, learning disabilities, and personal loss, and across every one of those environments, she saw the same truth: sport has the power to transform confidence, discipline, and hope.
She also saw something else. Talent is everywhere. Opportunity is not.
That realization is rooted in something personal. At four years old, Cassandra lost her mother, Anna Sylvia Cunningham, along with other members of her family, to a devastating act of family violence, a loss whose full weight she wouldn't understand until years later. In a time when trauma was rarely discussed, she had to find her own way forward, and she found it in sport. Through cross country, track, and eventually rowing, she discovered structure, resilience, belonging, and a reason to keep moving.
"The first time my life was saved was by my mother. The second time, it was saved by sport."
That belief carried her through a coaching career and the founding of the P3PE School of Physical Education, and eventually led her to something bigger: a way to connect her past to a greater purpose. El Sol De Sylvia Foundation carries her mother's name, not as a monument to grief, but as an act of defiance against the idea that circumstances and life's challenges should determine the limits of a young person's future.
What We Do
We award scholarships to youth athletes who need financial support to participate in their sport. Scholarships help cover the costs that most often keep talented kids on the sidelines: registration and membership fees, travel to practices and competitions, equipment, and other program expenses.
Every application is reviewed for more than athletic ability. Our selection committee looks for resilience, work ethic, and the kind of character that sport builds and sport rewards. Our inaugural cohort, the Founding Donors Scholarship Class, includes eight student-athletes from across the country, competing in sports from rowing to baseball, each carrying a story of perseverance alongside their talent.
Our Connection to Rowing
Rowing runs through the heart of this Foundation. As a national team rower and longtime rowing coach, Cassandra spent decades inside a sport she knows intimately: its cost of entry, its demands on families, and its power to teach discipline, teamwork, and mental toughness to anyone given the chance to learn it.
That firsthand experience shaped how El Sol De Sylvia approaches every sport we support, and it is also what led to our partnership with USRowing, the national governing body of the sport. USRowing has designated El Sol De Sylvia Foundation a Unity Partner, an official recognition of our work to make rowing more accessible, more inclusive, and more reflective of the communities it has historically overlooked. The designation connects us to USRowing's national network of clubs, coaches, and resources, extending our reach to young rowers who might not otherwise know a path like this exists. While our scholarships support athletes across many sports, rowing remains where Cassandra's own journey began, and the Unity Partner designation reflects that legacy.
Looking Ahead
The goal isn’t participation. It's transformation.
As El Sol De Sylvia grows, so does its reach: expanding scholarship access across more sports and communities, deepening partnerships with organizations that reach underserved youth, and building a sustainable scholarship fund to support generations of student-athletes to come.
El Sol De Sylvia Foundation is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
