Tales of Ronnie’s strength, skill, and sheer guts on the gridiron are well-known. (Not many players would sacrifice part of an injured pinky finger to get back in the game.) But it would be underestimating him to say football was the most important work of Ronnie’s life. These days, he has bigger dreams, among them All Stars Helping Kids, a foundation he and Karen formed in 1989. By teaming professional athletes with businesses and individual philanthropists, the foundation seeks to provide a safe, healthy, and rigorous learning environment for disadvantaged kids from low-income communities.

When you support UCSF, you start out thinking it’s about giving. Then you realize how much you get. Helping others has touched us, heart and soul.

A passion for child welfare is what brought the Lotts to UCSF with their foundation’s first major project. “Many kids are at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital for a long time, and can feel quite isolated,” Ronnie says. “There’s no greater opportunity to spur healing than by sharing what you know with others, so we wanted to build a technology room where patients and parents could connect with the outside world.”

For the Lotts, the ultimate thank-you came when they witnessed a young cancer patient laughing out loud while exchanging instant messages, by computer, with another cancer patient in Hawaii. "They were joking about how their fingernails were growing like crazy while their hair was falling out,” Ronnie says. Thinking of little things that mean so much, Ronnie and Karen come back to the kids whose courage has shaken their souls. Those kids show us that larger-than-life football heroes can have tender hearts, and that the biggest champions often come in small packages.