The Friend Who Shows Up
- Aug 5
- 3 min read
In 1997, the late Lynn Willeford had a great idea. Two of her South Whidbey neighbors were struggling to pay medical bills. So she sat down and wrote a personal letter to 75 friends, asking each one for a $100 donation.
The responses came back: $7,500 raised, eleven grateful neighbors helped. That was the beginning.
Nearly three decades later, Friends of Friends Medical Support Fund has disbursed more than $1.8 million dollars and now helps approximately 200 South Whidbey friends each year with medical expenses they could not otherwise cover.
What Friends of Friends Medical Support actually does
The work is exactly what the name suggests: friends paying for friends.
Friends of Friends pays providers directly — health professionals, hospitals, labs, pharmacies — and distributes gas and ferry vouchers for medically necessary travel off-island. The fund does not reimburse bills already paid and makes no direct payments to individuals. It pays the people who provided the care.
The current president of the board, Kathy Hein, described the work this way in a Whidbey Life feature: "We get to facilitate helping people who benefit from the support in paying medical bills, dental bills, and gas. So, the time that we give feels very purposeful."
The fund operates on annual dollar limits per individual, a deliberate constraint so the help can reach as many people as possible. It serves the four South Whidbey zip codes: 98236 (Clinton), 98260 (Langley), 98249 (Freeland), and 98253 (Greenbank). The fund is run by an all-volunteer board plus one part-time paid Service Coordinator. They are not caseworkers. They give no medical advice. They make no medical referrals. What they do, year after year, is cover the kinds of bills that — without this fund — would derail South Whidbey families.
Lynn Willeford's longer arc
Lynn Willeford passed away in January 2021 from a three-year fight with brain cancer, on her 73rd birthday. The full list of organizations she founded or co-founded over the years is remarkable: alongside Friends of Friends, she helped start Hearts & Hammers of South Whidbey, South Whidbey at Home, South Whidbey Free University, South Whidbey Community Co-op, the Back to School Program, Whidbey Island Local Lending, and Women of Whidbey, and was a co-conspirator in the creation of our very own Thriving Communities.
She and her husband, Blake, also owned and operated The Clyde Theatre in Langley — the oldest movie theater on Whidbey — and the same Clyde Theatre that opens ThrivingFest on Thursday night.
Two of the organizations Lynn helped found appear in the ThrivingFest program: The Hearts & Hammers film in Friday morning's Celebrating Our Home session, and the Friends of Friends film in Saturday morning's Supporting Our Community session. Both are still doing the work she modeled.
Kathy Hein, who became president of Friends of Friends in January 2024, frames her role as continuing Lynn's legacy of providing financial support to South Whidbey friends in need of medical support.
Mr. South Whidbey and other forms of showing up
If you live on South Whidbey, you may know Friends of Friends best through the Mr. South Whidbey Pageant — a male pageant that has run for two decades each fall and serves as the fund's primary fundraiser. Contestants spend the summer collecting votes; each vote is one dollar. The 2025 pageant marked 20 years and raised a record-breaking $72,000.
That is one of the more colorful expressions of an idea Lynn started with 75 letters and $100 asks. The form is different. The premise is the same.
At ThrivingFest
Friends of Friends is featured in the Saturday morning session at WICA — Supporting Our Community. The film sits alongside films about Mother Mentors, Island Senior Resources, Whidbey Veterans Resource Center, Healing Circles Langley, Goosefoot, and Partners for Youth Empowerment.
The panel afterward asks, in the program's own words: how do we sustain the health and well-being of all of our community members through each stage of life?
For Friends of Friends, the answer keeps coming back to the approach Lynn modeled in 1997. Identify the need. Ask the community. Pay the bills. Repeat for nearly three decades.
Thursday night, the festival opens at The Clyde Theatre — Lynn's theater — with the premiere of The Regenerative Power of Community featuring South Whidbey Prepares, followed by films celebrating her legacy. Two days later, we will watch a film about the medical support fund she started in 1997, still going.
That arc is the festival, hiding in plain sight.
The films are the prompt. The room — and the people in it, year after year, watering the work — is the point.
August 13–15, 2026 · Langley · Free, by donation · Sign up for specific sessions or all three days
