Hand On Her Heart life Comes Full Circle For Kate

How She’s Carrying On Both Her Mum And Sister’s Legacies.

- Fleur Guthrie

The last time Kate Figgins appeared in the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, she was a toddler in dungarees, with blonde pigtails, sitting on her mum’s knee.

It was for a story on two women who had lost their babies to congenital heart defects and had channelled their grief to write a handbook for other parents going through the same trauma.

As a result, the women, Linda Davies and Michelle Mann, helped start an organisation known today as Heart Kids.

Now, nearly 40 years later and in a tale of life coming full circle, Kate has been appointed CEO of the very charity her mother Michelle played a pivotal role in founding.

“Oh, she was absolutely stoked when I told her I had taken the job,” smiles Kate.

“It means Heart Kids is not going to lose sight of where it’s come from. And the more that I speak to people in this role day-to-day, often in the hospital wards, the more I can see the impact that Mum and Linda have made.”

When Kate looks at that original Weekly article, she says she feels so proud of them and understandably, emotional.

“The headline, ‘Little lives weren’t in vain’ was so apt at the time and even more relevant now as every week 12 babies are born with a congenital heart defect in New Zealand,” she says. “It’s also a real honour to my little sister Jessica, who died at six months old. Nobody wants to think that a child has died in vain.