She Doesn’t Live Here. But She Might Love It More Than You.

Bridget Delaney was about 7 the first time she bought an Eagles jersey. It was the day her entire family, including her dad, her mom, her grandmom and her great grandmom, made the drive from Lawrenceville, NJ to the Franklin Mills Mall to shop for a first communion dress.

“We look around and don’t find anything,” Bridget says. “So I go off with my dad. When we meet back up with my mom and grandmother, I have a midnight green Donovan McNabb jersey and no communion dress.”

At the time, she hadn’t known who McNabb even was.

“I picked his number because my dad told me he was the guy who throws the ball.”

That was just the beginning.

Bridget, now 32, still lives in Lawrenceville, works for the New Jersey Department of Agriculture, and is quick to tell you she’s a full on suburbanite who loves her yard and isn’t going anywhere.

But she also loves Philadelphia with a passion that only a sports fan can understand. And that’s all down to what has now become almost a second job, that of “professional volunteer.”

It Started With Sports

A few years ago, Bridget Googled “FIFA World Cup volunteering” and kept checking until a slot opened up. She wanted to build what she calls a volunteer resume, with an eye on the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. At the time, she didn’t know anyone in Philadelphia who volunteered much.

She got assigned to pre-match ceremonies for the FIFA Club World Cup, where she holds banners on the pitch when the players walk out.

“I didn’t know anyone in Philly who was big into volunteering at that point, so I made a lot of good friends doing that,” she says. “And being in the bowels of the Linc was really cool and special for me as an Eagles fan.”

One such friend was James Ligot, who “volunteers for just about everything in Philly.” They connected after the Club World Cup, when the two of them were part of a group that spent the fall conducting interviews for people who wanted to help with World Cup 2026.

“It was a crazy time, but it was cool,” she says. “We spent about four months interviewing thousands of candidates.”

It was Liggett who suggested that Bridget check out the Phambassadors. She signed up for Pham Camp in January, loved it, then signed her mom up for March and helped run it herself.

A Newly Minted Expert

Since Pham Camp, Bridget has been to five or six 52 Weeks of Firsts events and volunteered at most of them. She helped celebrate the first postmaster of the United States at Franklin Court in Center City. She helped with the Circus School in Mt. Airy’s celebration of the nation’s first circus performance in 1793. There was the first world’s fair on American soil at the Please Touch Museum.

And she’s not stopping there. She volunteered for NCAA March Madness and then this spring, at the PGA Championship at Aronimink, where she spent Thursday through Sunday in the shops. Next up is a TED Democracy talk at the Kimmel Center, and when Soccer 2026 kicks off she’ll be stationed at some of the city’s most iconic spots, including Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, City Hall, Love Park, and the Rocky Steps, answering questions from tourists who’ve come from all over the world.

She now knows the city so well that a friend who grew up in Northeast Philadelphia asked her: “How is it that you know this city better than I do?”

Bridget was a history major in college, and was particularly interested in colonial America, so Philadelphia has always meant more to her than a place to watch a game. But her love of the city’s story started earlier than that, right around the time the Eagles lost to the Patriots in Super Bowl XXXIX, when the Nicholas Cage movie National Treasure came out.

“That movie – where Cage is a historian and treasure hunter who steals the Declaration of Independence – made me excited about history and Philadelphia at the same time,” she says. “Philadelphia is a perfect place where those two things meet.”

For more contemporary history, she recommends that visitors – and even residents, for that matter – take the double-decker bus tour around Center City.

“That’s how I learned that the old Comcast building was designed to look like a phone jack, and the new one like a flash drive,” she says.

Layers of Time

What she loves most about this city is that it doesn’t hide what it’s been. There’s the Revolution, yes, and the signing of our founding documents. But there’s also the Civil War, the Underground Railroad, and being the first stop of freedom on the road north. And later, redlining and other forms of discrimination.

But it goes deeper than that.

As Philadelphia grew over the centuries, it left evidence of every era behind, and Bridget sees it the way a geologist reads rock. In layers.

“At Pham Camp, we have a gentleman named Alphonso who runs Black Journey walking tours of the city, and I believe it was Mark Siegel who was instrumental in making the Philadelphia Pride Visitor Center happen,” she says. “What I loved was seeing that the city isn’t hiding its history. You can only learn from history by learning it, not setting it away.”

Through Phambassadors she also got connected to Philly Pride 365 and is now on the volunteer committee. The Pride March is June 7th. As someone who is part of the LGBTQ community, she says, visibility matters, especially right now.

“There’s been some controversy about the March being moved from the ‘gayborhood’ to the Parkway, and I believe there’s now a $10 fee,” she says. “But that $10 pays for Pride 365 all year long. And we need to be on the Parkway. We need to be seen.”

What started as a move to help out at a sporting event has turned into something Bridget never saw coming. She now knows this city better than most people who live here. She’s made real friends, been an insider at some of Philadelphia’s biggest events, and earned a seat on a committee that matters to her personally.

Ask her what she’s doing most weekends and the answer is usually Philadelphia.

“It feels a little culty,” she admits, “but not in a cult way. In a good way. You just find yourself signing up for more and more things.”