Karen Matsuda; LaKenya Brimmer, UW Nursing Student and scholarship recipient; and Vivian Lee (Photo by Larry Matsuda)
Two longtime leaders in nursing and public health honored their mothers’ legacies by launching a new endowed scholarship on Saturday at the Mary Mahoney Professional Nurses Organization’s annual luncheon in Tukwila.
Karen Matsuda and Vivian Lee, friends and colleagues since the early 1970s, created the scholarship to celebrate the lives of their mothers—Michiko Sakohira and Alvirita Little—who, despite humble beginnings and limited opportunities, passed down powerful values of education, resilience, and service.
Sakohira and Little met in the early 1990s through a women’s travel group—the Wild Wonderful Women. They bonded during trips from Cannon Beach to Homer, Alaska.
“Both of our mothers came from very humble backgrounds and didn’t have the opportunity to attend college, but they both shared a commitment to learning and perseverance and supported our higher education and careers in nursing and public health,” Matsuda told the Northwest Asian Weekly.
Both women raised daughters who went on to make a lasting impact in healthcare.
Photo by Larry Matsuda
Sakohira was a standout student growing up in Fresno, Calif., but her plans for higher education were cut short when she and her family were incarcerated in Jerome, Arkansas during World War II. She later married Harry Sakohira, a decorated veteran of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, and helped build a life for their family through their produce business. Her daughter, Matsuda, went on to become a public health nurse, educator, and eventually the highest-ranking Asian American RN in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Region X.
Little, born in the segregated South, dedicated her life to helping others and breaking down racial and gender barriers. In the late 1940s, she joined her husband, Sgt. Major Frank Little, in Japan, where she organized donations to rebuild churches and care for orphans. When the Korean War brought wounded soldiers to a U.S. hospital in Tokyo, she rallied military families to help hospital staff. After moving to Seattle, she worked to support international students at UW and started the city’s first Girls Clubs when local Boys Clubs wouldn’t admit girls. Her daughter, Lee, became a trailblazer in her own right—the first Black nurse researcher in Region X of the U.S. Public Health Service and a leader in public health and nurse practitioner training across that region
The new scholarship aims to support nursing students from underrepresented backgrounds and help carry forward the legacies of two remarkable women.