By: Maya Carlyle, Recruitment and Events Associate, The Valley Foundation School of Nursing
In August of 2023, Linda Higgins (nurse and teacher in The Valley Foundation School of Nursing – and a “firebrand of a person”) watched the news and was heartbroken. Now she has 40 large, very full boxes in her garage, waiting to travel to Hawai’i in early December.
That night, on the news, Linda saw the reports of a series of wildfires on the Hawai’ian island of Maui, in and around the city of Lahaina. The fires, driven by dry, gusty winds prompted evacuations and caused widespread damage, destroying homes, businesses, and two of the elementary schools.
“I had a wild idea that came to me in the middle of the night,” Linda shared, “If I had thought it through, I probably wouldn’t have done it. I would have been overwhelmed.”
That wild idea? Help the children who would have attended some of those schools, and give them something joyful this holiday season.
Since August, Linda and “hundreds of family and friends and friends of friends” had put together 900 handmade stockings and 40 non-holiday themed gift bags, filling them with cloth backpacks, treats, play doh, crayons, toys, toothbrushes and toothpaste, hair brushes, and other things to bring some joy and comfort to impacted kids – all of them, ages 4 to 11 years old.
To make all of this happen, Linda has been working with other teachers – those in Lahaina, working to keep their kids learning and safe, and on the mainland, in the Bay Area. After hearing about the project, several instructors at West Valley College joined the project. The Fashion Design department made about 300 of the stockings which are heading over, and the Maker Space in the Interior Design department used their 3D printing lab to make bookmarks with banyan trees for the stockings.
The story of these gifts has made it pretty far. Linda was interviewed by Becky Worley for Good Morning America (the interview aired on December 8th), and Southwest Airlines donated the travel to get Linda and the 40 boxes of gifts over to Lahaina.
“That was the biggest, giant-est gift of all,” Linda said of the Southwest Airlines support. “And, I really just want to thank the people who have been so generous in helping out – at least 60 of my friends have been in my house for a week [in late November], stuffing stockings and bags.”
“This whole thing is so not the nursing method of ‘assess and make a plan first’ – I just implemented and then looked back, and I swear to all, I’m not sure how any of this happened. At one point I got 12 stockings in the mail from someone on the East Coast who I had never met or talked to.”
Linda shared that she intends to keep this project going – though, she hasn’t made a plan for that quite yet.
For more information about The Valley Foundation School of Nursing, please reach out to:
Email: Nursing@sjsu.edu
Phone: 408-924-3131