Family of Christy Kearney

This scholarship was created in honor of Christy Kearney, who died on 2/20/10 after fighting a long and courageous battle with breast cancer. Christy was an extraordinary nurse who touched countless people’s lives. She was generous, compassionate, fearless, and had the natural ability to infuse humor and creativity into her nursing practice. She was fiercely committed to working with underserved and disenfranchised populations, including the homeless and mentally ill, and devoted most of her career to community-based nursing, including working as a psychiatric nurse at SF General, an AIDS nurse case manager for Westside Community Clinic at the height of the AIDS epidemic, a home hospice nurse and eventually as a clinical instructor here at SF State. She believed in the value of holistic medicine and experienced firsthand the benefits of this during her own illness.

A quote from one of her patients demonstrates the compassion and dedication Christy embodied- “Even with her lupus and all, she’d walk up all these steps with a case of Ensure under her arm and bring other goodies and never complained. She never rushed out the door and stayed here until her job was done. You could tell that Christy really cared. She was such an angel.”

As one of her former colleagues once said, “she was a loving soul who spent her life caring for others. She was the kind of nurse we should all aspire to be.”

We hope that this scholarship will provide SFSU nursing students with the inspiration to carry on Christy’s nursing philosophy and values for many generations to come.