135 Students Raised Their Hands. Here's What They Told Us.

A little over a year ago, the Daisy Family Foundation didn't exist. It was an idea born out of watching our mother, Daisy, navigate a cancer diagnosis in a healthcare system that only had one person on her care team who could speak to her comprehensively in Vietnamese. This year, that idea became something real: our first scholarship cycle, our first three scholars, and our first full year of data on who the next generation of healthcare workers actually is.

We just published our inaugural Impact Report, and we wanted to share what stood out most — and make the full report available to anyone who wants to dig into the numbers themselves.

The demand was bigger than we expected

We opened applications expecting a modest first-year response. Instead, 135 students applied for three $2,000 scholarships — a 45:1 ratio that told us, immediately, that the need extends far beyond what any one family foundation can fund alone.

Just as telling: those applicants came from 26 states and Washington, D.C., and represented 122 different schools and health programs, from community colleges to Harvard, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins. This isn't a local scholarship anymore. It's a national signal.

They're not just planning to serve underserved communities — many already are

Across the applications we reviewed, 72.6% of applicants already had clinical or healthcare experience, 71.0% had community service or volunteer backgrounds, and 36.3% brought multilingual skills to their future patient care — the exact kind of language-concordant care access our founders wished their own mother had had.

• 72.6% — clinical or healthcare experience

• 71.0% — community service / volunteer work

• 67.7% — leadership positions

• 44.4% — research experience

• 36.3% — multilingual experience

• 31.5% — direct work with underserved communities

And the pool reflected real diversity: 75 applicants identified as Black or African American, Asian, Hispanic/Latino, or Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander — self-reported, not inferred — in a field where representation still lags far behind patient population

Meet the first three scholars

Choosing just three recipients from 135 extraordinary applications was the hardest part of our first year. We're proud to introduce:

• Wendy Wang — first-year medical student, UC Davis School of Medicine, focused on bridging healthcare gaps for Asian American immigrant communities.

• Yilda Macias — doctoral candidate in epidemiology, University of Washington-Seattle, researching long-term health outcomes in underserved populations.

• Loren Chua — fourth-year nursing student, Cal State Fullerton, with 540+ clinical hours already logged and a goal of becoming a critical care oncology nurse.

You can read more about each of their stories — in their own words — in the full report.

Where we go from here

Our first year taught us that the need and the talent both far outpace our current capacity. Over the next few years, we're focused on growing the number of scholarships we can award, building direct partnerships with universities and health programs, and tracking our scholars' outcomes as they move into the workforce — not just funding one moment, but following the whole pipeline.

If this is a mission you want to be part of — as a donor, a university partner, or a future applicant — the full report is the best place to start. It's the whole story, in one place, with the receipts.