Help Those Who Need to Be Helped: Alumna Jennifer Huggins Honors UAB School of Nursing with Bequest in Her Will

Jennifer Huggins with her scholarship recipient, Carlia Hood

By the time she volunteered in the bustling surgical unit of a smalltown hospital in Baldwin County at the age of 15, Jennifer Huggins (’78) knew exactly what she wanted to do when she grew up.

Her two aunts were nurses. She admired how compassion moved them to care for others. When the local hospital began a program for high schoolers to shadow medical professionals, Huggins knew she wanted to participate.

During the program she volunteered in a surgical unit and the operating room, where she got paired with a mentor—a nurse who had studied at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

That summer changed her life. By the time she graduated high school, she was on a steady path that led her to the nursing program at UAB and various surgical units at UAB Hospital after graduation, where she worked for nearly 25 years.

But it wasn’t enough to spend a career alongside society’s sickest and most vulnerable patients; Huggins wants to do more.

So that’s exactly what she’s doing. In June 2024, Huggins gave to the University to establish the Jennifer Huggins Endowed Scholarship in Nursing. Endowed scholarships provide a stable and lasting source of support that touches the lives of generations of students and significantly reduces the financial burden on recipients.

In addition to her outright gift, Huggins will be enhancing her scholarship through a bequest in her will and designating the UAB School of Nursing as a beneficiary.

“If there’s somebody who can’t go to nursing school because they don’t have the money, I want to help them get there,” Huggins said. “We have a nursing and a doctor shortage, and I wanted to give to help alleviate that. We need good nurses to take care of people at the bedside.”

Bequests and beneficiary designations are deferred forms of giving through a donor’s estate. They are flexible techniques that allow a donor to designate future support to the School of Nursing without parting with needed assets today.

Huggins’ approach maximized her philanthropic goals. By endowing a scholarship now and enhancing it with a planned gift from her estate, she can see the impact of her gifts during her lifetime and also rest assured that her philanthropic wishes will be carried out in the future.

For Huggins, giving to the University isn’t about making a name for herself. Instead, it’s about compassion—the universal need tying all her patients together: “We need people to take care of people.”

Like Huggins, you can support nursing students with scholarships today and multiply that impact for future generations through planned giving. For information about establishing an endowed scholarship or learning about your planned giving options, contact the School of Nursing’s Office of Development at (205) 975-9419 or nursealum@uab.edu or UAB’s Office of Planned Giving at (205) 996-7533 or plannedgiving@uab.edu today.