Next week, JW House is bringing back its community breakfast in Campbell, a tradition which, like so many others, had to pivot a bit during the COVID-19 pandemic. But facing challenging times is what JW House is all about.
For those who don’t know the story, the house adjacent to Kaiser Santa Clara provides a home away from home for people who have family members going through medical crises, either at Kaiser or other medical facilities. It was the dream of JW Knapen, a Bellarmine College Prep student who was battling cancer and wanted to find a way to help other kids and families going through the same thing. He died in 2005, but his dream became reality when JW House opened in 2008.
Last year’s Celebration of Hope fundraiser was virtual, and I experienced it in an unexpected way. I was called upon to co-host it with longtime emcee Lissa Kreisler. I was a last-minute fill-in for Chris Wilder, the former executive director of the Valley Medical Center Foundation who paired with Kreisler on the event for several years. But he’d suffered a massive stroke just a few weeks earlier, and I was honored to help out while knowing I wouldn’t be able to match Wilder’s unique personality.
For those in attendance at Villa Ragusa on April 28, Wilder will be making a welcome re-appearance, albeit on video as he is still recovering from his stroke a year later. And my guess is as emotional as Wilder’s message will be, it may not be the highlight of the breakfast, as guests will also hear from the family of Cynthia Villalobos, who also survived a stroke in May 2020 at age 23 while she was preparing to enter a doctoral program at UC-Davis.
In the ensuing months, she spent time at five different medical facilities, including Valley Medical Center in San Jose, which is where her mother and sister learned about JW House. They stayed there instead of making three-hour commutes back while Cynthia underwent treatment at VMC. “To find out that JW House existed and was willing to take us in was the miracle we needed,” Maricela Villalobos, Cynthia’s mother, says in a video.
The 7:30 a.m. breakfast at Villa Ragusa in Campbell is free to attend, though a donation will be requested, and you can RSVP at www.jwhouse.org/coh22. For those who aren’t quite comfortable with group settings yet, the event also will be livestreamed at the same site.
THE PLACE FOR PRINT: Another event make a welcome return this month is the Bay Area Printers’ Fair and Wayzgoose on April 23 at History Park in San Jose. (A “wayzgoose” was an annual party held by print shops for their workers, by the way).
Jim Gard of the San Jose Printers Guild says there will be printing demonstrations, poster printing and more than three dozen printing, book, ink and paper exhibitors on hand at the festival — which runs from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The outdoor event is free to attend, but if you register in advance online at printersguild.wordpress.com, you’ll also get a letterpress notecard.
MORE THAN A CENTURY OF SERVICE: The Association of Auxiliaries for Children gathered last week at Sharon Heights Golf and Country Club in Menlo Park for the first time since 2019, with AAC President Lisa Cole and Cynthia Brandt, CEO and President of the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health, welcoming everyone back to the in-person luncheon.
The group, made up of seven individual organizations, was formed in 1919 — that was two pandemics ago — to support the Stanford Convalescent Home and today puts it philanthropy toward Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford. Annually, the auxiliaries and their nearly 1,000 members in the Bay Area provide the hospital with $2 million in donations. You can find out more about their work at supportlpch.org/get-involved/auxiliaries-affiliates.
Source: www.mercurynews.com