Clea Newman remembers her first time volunteering with SeriousFun, the globe-spanning, free camp network for ill children.

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It was just the one camp back then — in Connecticut — set up by celebrated actor, activist and American icon Paul Newman in 1988. “My dad said, ‘Why don’t you go up and volunteer as a counselor?’” she recalls to The Hollywood Reporter. “I never really babysat much. I was a little nervous about it. And he said, ‘Just try it.’” At the time, Newman, the youngest of his six children, had a whole career mapped out in law. She giggles thinking about it now. “That ended up not being the plan,” she says over Zoom, those signature Newman eyes — piercing blue — twinkling.

Soon after she arrived at camp, she was struck down by poison ivy. “[It was] horrible — all over my legs,” she remembers. But luckily for Newman, she had befriended three young boys, around the age of nine, staying at the camp, who took better care of her than she could ever have imagined: “They took me to the medical center and helped wash my legs, put lotion all over them to take away the itch. They were so concerned about me. It absolutely floored me.”

At SeriousFun, however, these doting kids were going through a parent’s worst nightmare: All three were battling life-threatening blood illnesses. Still, they tended to Newman’s blistered skin. “I drove into camp that first time, a little bit spoiled, in my early 20s. I left a totally changed person,” she says.

Now 61, Newman has never left camp — not really. Since 1988, she’s been a major advocate for SeriousFun and watched her father expand the Connecticut retreat to 30 camps and programs across five continents, treating over 2.5 million children with serious illnesses worldwide. They offer residential summer camps, family weekends, hospital outreach programs, bereavement weekends, adaptive winter sports, teen clubs and young adult retreats. Crucially — a hard line the late actor instilled from the get-go — each camp is an independent, non-profit organization, relying on private funding to ensure every child and family can take part completely free of charge.

Newman and the team now cater to over 100 various illnesses, including cancer, HIV/AIDS and an array of mental health issues like PTSD and anxiety. SeriousFun research shows that the experiences have transformed millions of lives, helping to numb the trauma, alleviate some pain and, quite simply, give these kids their childhoods back. With their first U.K. camp officially up and running this week, Newman gave THR some of her precious time — and even more precious memories of her late father — to coincide with the launch.

She casts her mind back to what drove her dad, the Oscar-winning star of The Color of Money, Cool Hand Luke and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, to found what would become something of a charity behemoth. “There were a lot of things that were happening at that time in his life, but it really started for two reasons,” she begins.

Her father, who was married to Newman’s mother, Joanne Woodward, from 1958 until his death in 2008, felt incredibly lucky. “He used to call it ‘Newman’s luck,’” she says. “I mean, he just happened to be at the right place at the right time for everything in his life, or that’s how he felt.” But a close childhood friend of theirs became very ill, and the family would go visit him in the local hospital. “All the children and adults were being treated on the same floor,” Newman explains, “and everyone would come out in the hallway and say hi to him. He met all these beautiful families and parents whose children were being treated there, and they would talk to him about how their child was missing out on their childhood.”

Paul, as a father of six, was devastated to hear of their anguish. “Kids were basically in and out of hospitals for sometimes years, and they would miss out on everything — from school to making friends, to all those childhood experiences that make you who you are,” says his daughter. She remembers how fondly he spoke of summer camps; how formative that experience was for him, long before he was the Hollywood legend he came to be. “He said, ‘Well, why can’t I create a camp for children living with serious illness?’ Everybody told him he couldn’t do it, and of course that made him even more focused on doing it.” She is beaming with pride as she speaks. “He knew he didn’t know everything, so he surrounded himself with the most knowledgeable people he could find, including the head of pediatric oncology at Yale University Hospital. He found the property, built 52 buildings, recruited the medical care volunteers, and we were serving kids within 18 months.”

The second camp, in Upstate New York, swiftly followed. There, they were serving children affected by the 1986 Chornobyl disaster in Ukraine. The expansion after that came through Paul Newman spotting different needs in different areas, and finding a local champion to partner with. Many of the camps — such as the partnership programs with NGOs in India, Africa and the Caribbean — were founded through his visiting the country. “My dad was over in Africa and he asked the gentleman who owned the site, ‘What do you do with this place when it’s not in season?’” says his daughter. “He said, ‘It’s really hard. We have to shut everything down. We have to let everybody go.’ And dad said, ‘Well, you know, I’ve been running these camps in Peru. And I was wondering, would you want to serve children here when you’re not having safaris?’ And the guy said, ‘I would love to do that.’”

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In fact, SeriousFun was one of the first programs in the world to serve children with HIV. “Dad kept saying, ‘These children have nobody else,’” says Newman. “It was so heart-wrenching to see. And this is really just at the beginning of the HIV crisis. There was no protocol for how to serve these kids. And some of them would come to camp, and they’d never been held.” Newman takes a moment to let the emotion in her voice settle.

Over the course of nearly 40 years, SeriousFun has scaled up to become a 21st-century charity, and now serve children with rare diseases. They rely on the work of dedicated medical professionals and volunteers who work around the clock to make sure every child gets the camp experience they deserve: “Every single activity is customized for every child,” continues Newman. “We have arts and crafts. We have [horseback] riding. We have swimming. We have theater. We have camping. And everything is accessible.” Swimming pools are heated to 93 or 94 degrees so children with sickle cell disease don’t have a crisis. Zip lines have been adapted to take a child up in a wheelchair on a ventilator. Not one child is to miss out on any activity. Newman lauds the determination of a 30,000-volunteer team involved in the massive operation that is organizing and running these camps. Every stressful moment is worth it. “The smiles, the screams of joy. That’s what children should be doing,” she tells THR.

Newman says early conversations with her father about the camp were a push-and-pull process. “He and I had just an amazing relationship, and it grew as we both got older. But he was very funny with me because he knew I was stubborn, kind of like him,” she laughs again. “He knew if he told me things directly, I probably would be like, ‘I know better. I’m going to do it this way.’ So he would just gently say, ‘Maybe you want to try this…’ but after I volunteered the first time,” she concedes, “I was hooked.”

She has taken on various roles at SeriousFun over the years, as a volunteer, staff member and development officer. She was on the board of directors until 2012, before transitioning to her current position as ambassador. The SeriousFun Children’s Network has been a lifelong pursuit for Clea, who was asked by her father to oversee his philanthropic legacy before he passed away. “I kind of always feel like a sloppy second to him,” she confesses. “He really just had this guiding light. But I really feel like, over all these years, I’ve incorporated that guiding light and vision into who I am. And I can’t imagine not being involved. My husband jokes with me all the time. He’s like, ‘Are you ever going to retire?’ And I keep thinking, ‘Why would I do that? It’s part of who I am.’”

She is particularly animated when talking about their latest launch, Over the Wall at Ockbrook School, near Derby in the U.K. The site is open and ready to welcome campers from Friday, though plans are already in motion to enhance the facilities through 2027. Thankfully, SeriousFun has secured a 40-year lease on the venue, establishing it as the charity’s new headquarters and permanent home, and it’s safe to say Newman is nothing short of relieved to finally have a base in Britain. “There’s so much need,” she says (Newman will later describe the demand as the most challenging part of her job), “and they’ll be able to serve so many more children.”

Paul Newman was especially keen that the SeriousFun team stay up to date on some of the most pressing health conditions for kids, and his daughter says that, for this reason, they’ve been branching out into mental health illnesses due to the post-pandemic rise of social anxiety, depression and PTSD among young children. “Some of our camps are serving that as the primary illness,” she explains. They’ve got mental health and wellness experts on hand at dedicated camps for these issues, and have partnered with mental health and suicide prevention organization The Jed Foundation to guarantee the best possible care.

Some children have such severe anxiety that they won’t leave the house or go to school. But SeriousFun research shows that the camps are genuinely life-changing for kids and their parents. “They were surrounded by other children who were dealing with so many other issues and saw it and felt included and didn’t feel isolated,” she says about a recent camp program. “Every single one of them went back to school.” Their parents told Newman: “‘Thank you for giving me back my child.’”

What Paul Newman’s SeriousFun has achieved in 38 years is a testament to the actor’s vision and humanity. They are, evidently, qualities that his daughter has inherited — that much is obvious from the tenderness in her voice, the Over the Wall T-shirt she proudly wears on our call — and Clea Newman thinks he’d be pretty proud to see how the charity has evolved since his passing.

“We’ve served two and a half million children and their families around the world, and the fact that our programs have expanded into so many different kinds of outreach, I think he would be amazed,” the younger Newman tells THR. “[But] he had a saying within our family. He’d pat you on the back and be like, ‘Honey, that’s so great! That’s a great start,’” she laughs again. “So I think he would feel the same way that I do: that there are so many children and families who still need us.”

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To find out more about SeriousFun and the work they do, head to seriousfun.org.