How Brighten A Heart™ Came to Life
Providing thoughtfully curated Comfort Care Totes and meaningful items to patients through hospital and community partnerships.
Photo shared with permission
ᰔᩚ About Us
Our story
Brighten A Heart™ grew from years of simple, heartfelt giving. For more than sixteen years in New York City, founder Sabrina Miller spent her holidays creating and donating hundreds of mini floral arrangements to hospitals and nursing homes. Many were delivered through Citymeals on Wheels, a nonprofit serving older adults who are homebound across New York City. Volunteers and drivers brought the flowers alongside meals, small gestures that filled homes with color and warmth.
Sabrina was deeply moved by the volunteers, drivers, and staff who showed up with steady care. Those moments made one thing clear: kindness travels, and she wanted to build a nonprofit that could carry that feeling forward.
That experience became more personal when Sabrina’s mother went through major heart surgery followed by a long and difficult recovery. During repeated hospital stays, Sabrina and her sister saw how isolating those rooms could feel, and how even one small, thoughtful gesture could bring comfort and lift someone’s spirits.
Those experiences changed the way Sabrina understood care and reinforced how meaningful simple acts of kindness can be during difficult moments.
Photo shared with her mother’s permission.
With permission from care teams to bring small, approved items to patients, Sabrina began offering flowers, cards, and simple gifts to those she met. The responses were meaningful. A quiet smile, a brief laugh, or a softened expression revealed a simple truth: kindness can reach people in moments when words fall short.
From those experiences, Brighten A Heart™ was created. It is rooted in compassion, creativity, and community, with a focus on bringing comfort and kindness to patients of all ages and older adults in care settings.
ᰔᩚ About Us
Where Brighten A Heart™ Begins
Brighten A Heart™ is incorporated in Nevada and registered to operate as a foreign nonprofit in Hawaiʻi and Washington State.
Our work is growing across all three states, each with a meaningful connection to the story, community, and mission of Brighten A Heart™.
Nevada
Nevada is Brighten A Heart™’s home state and is also home to Sabrina’s sister. Our community work has already begun in the Las Vegas area, with partnerships supporting patients and care communities and Comfort Care Tote programs continuing to grow.
Hawaiʻi
Hawaiʻi is home to Sabrina and her mother and is where much of the inspiration for Brighten A Heart™ became deeply personal. Today, our work across Hawaiʻi continues to grow through community art, local partnerships, patient support, and meaningful acts of kindness.
Washington State
Washington State is where Sabrina and Sheina grew up and where much of their family still lives today. In 2026, Brighten A Heart™ began building meaningful community partnerships throughout the Seattle area through art, floral giving, senior outreach, and projects created to bring people together through kindness.
ᰔᩚ About Us
For Hospitals & Care Facilities
Our programs are developed in coordination with facility
leadership and infection control guidelines.
Brighten A Heart™ partners with hospitals, nursing homes, and hospice programs to deliver thoughtfully curated Comfort Care Totes directly to participating facilities. Our totes are designed to be simple for staff to distribute, mindful of waste, and appropriate for hospital and care environments. All items are nonclinical and thoughtfully selected to provide comfort, kindness, and a sense of care to patients of all ages.
We do not request or require patient medical information, and all distributions are coordinated through designated facility or organizational contacts.
Each delivery is coordinated based on your facility’s preferences, whether through volunteer services, social work, nursing staff, or another approved department.
ᰔᩚ About Us
A small moment that shaped Brighten A Heart™
During my mom’s surgery in Hawaiʻi, I learned that some of her ICU nurses had young children at home. I had written a children’s book the year before, designed to be read together, with questions that invite both the child and adult to talk and laugh along the way. I donated a box of copies to the unit so members of the care team could take one home to share with their children.
One of my mom’s nurses read the book with her daughter and later sent this handwritten card. She had already cared for my mom with such steady kindness, and still found time to say thank you.
What stayed with me was not the book itself, but what happened around it. I wrote it because I thought it would be fun for kids, especially those who ask a lot of questions. Watching it move from one person to another created something unexpected, a quiet moment between a nurse and her daughter after a long shift.
Brighten A Heart™ carries that same feeling forward. Today, our Comfort Care Totes and Brighten A Heart Kids™ programs bring together thoughtful comfort items, community artwork, activities, and notes of kindness. These gifts are shared through care teams and approved partners, helping place small moments of care into the hands of patients who may need them most.
Brighten A Heart Kids™ totes may also include age appropriate books selected for different stages of childhood. Questions for Breakfast is included for ages 3 to 5, while My Storybook can be included for children through age 11, encouraging conversation, imagination, creativity, and connection.
ᰔᩚ About Us
Patient Privacy & Respect
Our leadership team receives training in patient privacy and confidentiality and is committed to protecting patient privacy throughout program coordination.