Zynovia Hetherington’s Legacy: A Family Home
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Meet Zynovia Hetherington, an inspiring African American woman. For her entire adult life, she has selflessly supported and guided thousands of people without regard for her own comforts. Rather than putting her financial resources into buying a home, she’s given to others all her life. Now 53 and facing an uncertain future, her passionate wish is to own a family home as her legacy to her two adult children and large extended family. She envisions the home as a family gathering place—a place of refuge, respite, love and care, a base from which to minister to others.
Nine years ago, she was diagnosed with a rare, deadly and progressive form of autoimmune disease scleroderma. She has Diffuse Systemic Scleroderma that has devastated her digestive tract, requiring several surgeries over the years and leaving her now with only her esophagus and stomach, tubes for removing waste, and an intravenous port to receive all her nutrients. In March of 2019 she had life altering surgery, the removal of all but one foot of her intestines resulting in her inability to eat. She cannot eat food. By 2019, the associated pain and medical crises required her to spend as many days in the hospital as not in the hospital. And in 2020 she spent up to half of each month in Overlake hospital in Bellevue, Washington She battles daily fatigue and full body pain. While her doctors have shared that there is nothing more they can do, she continues to fight every day to live a life full of service. Her most heartfelt vision is to know her family owns a home before she passes.
Friends and family hope for the best and fear for the worst; family are aware that any setback could be the last one at this stage of the disease. Nevertheless, she continues to work full time, zooming meetings and teaching classes even when she is confined to a hospital. By nature very private about her disease and dire prognosis, few around her know the devastating extent of her disease or her prognosis. The disease has been a financial drain, despite having health insurance. Money that otherwise could have gone into paying a mortgage instead went to medical copays and prescriptions.
Over the decades, Zynovia has assisted fellow African American church members, within a community beset historically and currently with racial and economic inequities. Zynovia supports their fiscal and spiritual growth in a myriad of ways. Only her minister, a close friend, knows the true extent of her lay ministry to her church family and to youth. She always shows up and participates unless hospitalized.
She is the keystone rock of her extended family, the one family members turn to for comfort, wisdom, spiritual guidance, and material support. When one of her sisters died in 2005, she raised her sister’s three children. Again, money flowed to pressing family needs rather than a mortgage.
She was a beloved colleague of mine at the University of Washington School of Social Work until I retired. The Director of the Child Welfare Training and Advancement Program (CWTAP), she oversees MSW students to receive specialized education and fieldwork in the complex arena of child welfare, providing substantial personal and career guidance along the way. Her mentoring has enabled literally over a thousand students, a majority of whom are students of color, to graduate and begin Washington State employment. She is always an outspoken champion of racial, social and economic justice, within the university and throughout her life. She educates people state-wide and nationally about racial disproportionality in child welfare, fulfilling her special interest in working with people of African descent. She has led innovative, record setting summer trips to Ghana for diverse groups of students across the University from freshmen to graduate students.
Her racial justice work was recognized with the UW’s MLK Jr Community Service Award, her support was recognized by the Black Student Union (BSU) and under her leadership the CWTAP team also received the MLK award.
You probably are aware that for most of us, our economic status is strongly linked to our race. You know about the enormous gap between the wealth status of white people and people of color. For me, this Fund is one opportunity, however small, to put my values regarding equity and racial justice into action.
Zynovia is a daily inspiration to those of us who know her. Always the giver of assistance, now she is finally allowing others to enable her to realize her vision of a home owned by her family. Her adult children are actively looking at homes in Puget Sound’s overpriced market, looking miles away from the core of the city to find a bargain. A bargain fixer upper will cost a minimum of $350,000. The funds will be used for a down payment to ensure the monthly payments are reasonable. Those of us organizing this GoFundMe Project hope and pray to see her live to enjoy the satisfaction of living in a home her family is buying rather than a rental. Please help us make this dream a reality!
Organizer and beneficiary
James DeLong
Organizer
Clinton, WA
Zynovia Hetherington
Beneficiary