Photo caption: Carolina B., who started at Napa Valley College in fall 2025, is one of the students Daisy’s gift is helping today.
How Daisy Takahashi Cavalli has helped 46 students forge their futures
Daisy Takahashi Cavalli never got to graduate from college, but because of her generosity, 46 Napa Valley students are on their way.
When Daisy passed away in 2017 at age 95, she left a legacy gift to Napa Valley Community Foundation to create the Daisy Cavalli Scholarship Fund. Since we awarded the first scholarships in 2019, the Fund has given nearly $1 million to help 46 students pay for college at schools across the country. They’ve gone to Napa Valley College, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, UC Berkeley, UCLA, the University of Chicago, and Yale.
The scholarship renews every year, so students have support for all four years of college. Carolina B. (pictured), who started at Napa Valley College in fall 2025, is one of the students Daisy’s gift is helping today.
A life shaped by injustice
Daisy was born on March 20, 1922, in Palo Alto to Japanese immigrant parents. Her father was a laundryman and her mother a homemaker. She grew up on the Peninsula and graduated from Sequoia High School in Redwood City in 1939 at 17.
Within three years, her world was turned upside down. In 1942, after Executive Order 9066, Daisy and her family were forced from their home and imprisoned by their own government, along with more than 110,000 other people of Japanese ancestry, most of them American citizens. The Takahashi family was first held at the Tanforan Assembly Center, a racetrack in San Bruno converted into a detention camp, where nearly 8,000 people were crowded into hastily built barracks and former horse stalls. That September, Daisy was moved to the Topaz incarceration camp in the Utah desert. A year later, she was sent to the Tule Lake detention camp in Northern California, the last of the camps to close. After spending two more years there behind barbed wire and armed guard towers, Daisy wasn’t released until October 22, 1945. She was 23 and had lost more than three years of her young adult life, for no reason except her heritage.
Putting down roots in Napa
After her release, Daisy returned to the Bay Area and rebuilt her life. She met Francis Cavalli, a packaging foreman, and they married in San Francisco in 1962. Later that decade, they acquired a home on Silverado Trail in Napa from a member of Daisy’s family. Francis died in 1984, and Daisy lived in the Valley for decades thereafter.
Daisy and Francis didn’t have children together, though Francis had children from a previous marriage. Still, Daisy found her own way to invest in the next generation. The Cavallis worked hard and saved carefully, and according to her nephew, Daisy volunteered in the Napa Valley College cafeteria, close to the students her gift would one day support.
A promise kept
People who knew Daisy say she always meant to leave money for scholarships. She especially wanted to help first-generation college students get the education she was never able to finish.
We think she’d be thrilled to see how many students have walked onto campuses across the country with her help. Daisy’s generosity will keep opening doors for Napa students for years to come.