Heaven's Door Oncology & Wellness Foundation

Daphne’s parents, Reverend Donald and Mrs. Ida Evans have been her inspiration. With only an 11^th grade education, Ida Evans designed and built two 30-room retreat centers for women and summer campsites. Daphne remembers as a child, holding the joists together while her mother, no more than 5' tall and 115 lbs, wielded a hammer; fixing lunches for her parents and the workers. Daphne traveled with her parents to Canada to assist with building churches on reservations. Her mother also taught her that to help others was a ministry that was not passé.

With this shining example and encouragement, Daphne began to volunteer at an early age to care for cancer patients, sometimes staying for weekends to relieve the overtaxed caregivers. She visited Nicaragua after the Sandinista regime and had trucks bring clothing over the bombed out roads for the villagers while she flew in by a Russian parachute plane. She hosted clothing drives in San Francisco during the tsunami and found pilots of private planes to fly the supplies to the victims there. She also found jobs for young professionals stranded by Katrina and paid out of pocket to fly them to their new job locations. She became a member of the Italian Make A Wish Foundation and would visit Genoa and speak directly to the children, encouraging hotels to offer free accommodation for the children and their parents. In 2008, she was nominated as San Francisco's Woman of the year by the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society; devoting 3 months in marathon fundraising. She could never have had the courage or the tenacity to do any of this without her parents showing her that “it is more blessed to give than to receive.”