‘A really beautiful event’: Nonprofit’s gala honors Moscow student victims
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- North Idaho nonprofit hosts 3rd annual formal gala May 2 in CDA to fund scholarships.
- Made With Kindness Foundation awarded $30,000 in 2025 and plans $45,000 this year.
- Annual gala and foundation events honor the four Moscow college students killed in 2022.
Years later, Ashlin Couch still remembers the warmth and kindness of her close friends and University of Idaho sorority sisters Madison Mogen and Xana Kernodle.
The three young women grew up in North Idaho’s Kootenai County, but became inseparable at Pi Beta Phi as students on the college campus in Moscow. After leaving the sorority house as upperclassmen, Couch and Mogen lived together at an off-campus home on King Road before Couch graduated early and turned over her lease to Kernodle, who moved in to take her place.
“They were just so real and genuine, and so I think that that’s just what made so many people drawn to them,” Couch told the Idaho Statesman in a phone interview. “I’m so grateful to have known them.”
Mogen, 21, and Kernodle, 20, along with fellow U of I undergraduates Kaylee Goncalves, 21, and Ethan Chapin, 20, were fatally stabbed at the King Road home in November 2022. The impacts of their deaths still reverberate in the small college town, and throughout Idaho.
Seeking to help refocus the narrative surrounding the four students, Couch, who now lives in San Diego, and her mother, Angela Navejas, worked together to establish the Made With Kindness Foundation in 2024 in honor of her friends. The nonprofit built around empowerment initiatives and inspiring hope and connection in Coeur d’Alene and Washington’s Spokane County is now into its third year. Mogen’s mother, Karen Laramie, is a member of the nonprofit’s board.
On May 2, the organization will host its third annual Make It Pink Gala at The Coeur d’Alene Resort to raise money toward the nonprofit’s aim of offering scholarships to college-bound high school seniors. Last year, Made With Kindness awarded $30,000 to local students to help offset college costs. Among the recipients was Goncalves’ youngest sister, who now attends college in Texas.
The black-tie event — with a cocktail hour, prime rib and salmon dinner, live entertainment and a silent auction — is the nonprofit’s main way of generating proceeds to fund the scholarships. To that end, Made With Kindness is continuing its yearly tradition and plans to provide $45,000 for the next round of students this spring, Navejas said by phone.
“It’s very high energy,” she said of the formal gala. “We’ve tried to design it to be positive and uplifting — and it’s fun, too. And it’s just a gorgeous setting.”
Adds her 25-year-old daughter: “It’s just a really beautiful event.”
Along with Mogen’s family, the Kernodles attend the gala each year. They also assist with selecting the scholarship recipients, Navejas said.
Nonprofit work grows in dedication
Goncalves, who also hailed from Kootenai County and was best friends with Mogen since middle school, was Couch’s roommate in the King Road home when she lived there as well. Goncalves was formerly a focus of the Made With Kindness Foundation’s efforts, but has become less of a featured honoree as her family works to establish a separate nonprofit.
“But regardless, Kaylee is a huge part of this,” Navejas said. “She’ll always be a huge part of this.”
The Goncalveses’ forthcoming nonprofit has a mission of raising funds to support and empower crime victims, including by privately covering costs of advanced DNA work to prosecute their cases, Steve Goncalves, Kaylee’s father, told the Statesman. The family plans to name the nonprofit Kaylee Jade: Murder Has a Name.
The Chapin family also founded the Ethan’s Smile Foundation, a nonprofit in honor of their son and brother that annually awards college scholarships in Washington’s Skagit Valley, where he and his siblings grew up.
Now approaching three and a half years since the deaths of Couch’s friends in Moscow, and eight months since the perpetrator was sentenced to four life terms in prison, she and her mother continue to pay tribute to their legacies. Annually, on Mogen and Kernodle’s birthdays — designated Maddie May Day and Xanapalooza — the foundation encourages people to be kind to others and spend time with loved ones, in remembrance.
“The biggest thing is just doing what you can now in the world, potentially an act of kindness or anything like that — or just spreading positivity in honor of them — is what they would have wanted,” Couch said. “And that’s what I love to see.”
Tickets and reserved tables for up to eight are still available for the annual gala at the Hagadone Event Center in Coeur d’Alene, as are event and foundation sponsorships. For more information, visit: madewithkindnessfoundation.com
