Tricia McCauely (Via YouCaring)

Tricia McCauley’s friends liked to joke that if the actress and yoga teacher had a superhero name, it would be “Connection Woman.”

Hundreds of the people that she touched are now contributing to a memorial fund providing health insurance for theater professionals in McCauley’s name, in the wake of her murder after disappearing on Christmas Day.

“She was one of the truest extroverts that I knew, she really thrived with people,” says Ann Mezger, whose friendship with McCauley dates back to their days at American University. The 46-year-old’s wide and vibrant community was drawn from the myriad aspects of her life, as a yoga teacher, actress, herbalist, and nutritional counselor.

So when a group of eight of her closest girlfriends were coming up with ways to honor McCauley, they wanted to find a way to weave her experiences together.

“We talked though quite a few ideas from various aspects of her life. What we finally returned to was that across all of her jobs … one of the through lines for her, unfortunately, was that none of those gave her health insurance,” Mezger says. “It was a stress her whole adult life.”

Suffering from debilitating food allergies, McCauley was deeply relieved when she qualified for the Actors’ Equity union, which provided health insurance. After she began focusing less of her time on acting, McCauley was able to get insurance under the Affordable Care Act—the future of which is extremely uncertain.

“As someone who was a healthcare provider in her own right, it was doubly ironic that she herself didn’t have health insurance” at times, says Mezger, who also once ran a theater company with McCauely. “This is something that she would have been so happy to be a recipient of.”

Mezger and her collaborator Anne McCaw are nearly halfway to their initial goal of raising $75,000 to set up Tricia’s Fund, which would offer health insurance to members of the theater community. “It might be someone at a point in their career where they’re just starting out and need a boost to stay in the field, or someone who has been doing it a while and needs some encouragement,” Mezger says.

The goal is to raise enough to set the fund up in perpetuity, and Mezger and McCaw are in talks with local theater organizations to find a partner to administer it. Friends from all aspects of McCauley’s life have offered up their expertise to help make it a reality, while others have dug deep to donate.

“The outpouring of generosity that we’ve experienced is a testament to Connection Woman,” Mezger says. “I think she would be amazed at how many people she affected so deeply,”

For more information or to donate the fund, see here.