Sacramento’s ‘spreading of love’ helps provide frontline workers with equipment

Faced with patients on ventilators and seemingly endless treatments, Selena Srabian, an ICU nurse at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center, easily finds herself getting stressed.

Knowing healthcare workers nationwide are in need of personal protective equipment, in addition to a morale boost, Srabian and her sister, Anna Ryan, an emergency department nurse at Sutter Medical Center in Sacramento, started Protect with Heart.

The group makes scrub hats with the goal of protecting frontline workers, while bringing them together. The sisters partnered with Sacramento artist Tim Collom, who used a heart print as the design on the hats. The project is funded by donations and purchases of Collom’s custom print, all of the proceeds of which go to the project.

When the pandemic began, Srabian and Ryan noticed that among the shortages of PPE was a lack of scrub hats. While in the past they were worn only during certain occasions, COVID-19 has required extra precautions like the head coverings.

By Sunday evening, Protect with Heart raised about $27,000, both through purchases and donations, to make scrub hats, which cost a little of $10 each to produce. The project will ship the hats to hospitals in need.

While the project has been in the works since March, figuring out how to get the print on fabric, working out the details of the hat’s design and waiting for the manufacturer to reopen took time. The production of the hats began only a week ago.

Srabian, Ryan and Collom are excited to pick up the first box of about 1,000 hats from their manufacturer in San Francisco later this week.

Srabian and Ryan were able to pull together the production with the help of their company, Annie and Isabel. The nurses started the designer hospital gown company in 2010 and were able to use their manufacturer to produce the scrub hats.

The choice to make hats was out of practicality. Without hospital-grade production, masks and gowns would be useless to healthcare workers. The sisters first started making hats from gown scraps at Annie and Isabel, giving them out to coworkers and friends.

“Everyone at work wanted more. That’s kind of part of where it came up in our heads like, ‘Maybe we should do this. It’s bringing so much joy to our coworkers on the front lines,’” Ryan said.

Protect with Heart’s current goal is to raise $50,000 to make close to 5,000 scrub hats, but they would be blown away if they could make more. The project also aims to ship boxes nationwide to hospitals hard hit by the pandemic.

Nancy Lipsitz, a doctor and wife of David Langer, a neurologist who stars in Netflix docuseries “Lenox Hill,” donated money to the project and scrub hats will be sent to her hospital and to Lenox Hill Hospital in New York.

Big Heart donors can sponsor an entire box of hats with a $500 donation, allowing them to include a personalized note.

Having already made it past halfway to their goal, the Srabian, Ryan and Collom are amazed by the support shown by the community.

“We’re super excited for people to start wearing it because then we can show everyone who has been supporting us how much it means to people,” Ryan said.

Collom has experience with a similar fundraiser using his prints. In 2018, he donated over $150,000 in proceeds from a print of California to support firefighters during a destructive wildfire season.

The artist hopes his heart pattern will make its way on scrub hats all over the nation.

“Ultimately, I just want want to do whatever we can to make as much money for this cause as possible,” Collom said.

Those interested in donating or buying a print from Protect with Heart can go to their website, protectwithheart.com.

“It’s a spreading of love, not only from us, as healthcare workers, to our colleagues, but also from the community,” Ryan said.

This story was originally published July 20, 2020 at 6:23 AM.