Giving Care Givers A Vacation

Heather McHugh won $500,000 and had an intelligent idea:

- Alyssa Jung

WHEN SEATTLE-BASED poet Heather McHugh, now 67, won a $500,000 “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, a philanthropy dedicated to supporting creativity, she didn’t buy a Maserati or fly to Paris. Instead, she put the money in the bank and continued teaching college courses and writing poetry. “I was just stunned,” says Heather. It wasn’t until about two years later, in 2011, that she finally figured out what to do with it.

That year, Heather’s godson and his wife welcomed their first child, a beautiful baby girl who was born severely disabled; doctors didn’t think she’d ever be able to walk, talk, or feed herself. “I saw how people’s lives can change overnight. I started thinking about all the people on this earth who are in the same situation,” says Heather.

She discovered there are millions of caregivers in the United States taking care of the chronically ill or disabled 24/7. “It’s a heartbreaking contract of love, and who but a poet would be lit up by that notion?” she says. So in 2012, Heather formed