The College of Nursing is expanding access to nursing education and careers to students from underrepresented groups — which could lead to dramatic changes in the workforce.
The Workforce Diversity grant is designed to bring students from diverse communities into the College of Nursing and ultimately graduate them into the workforce. For Nauja Swann, who started her third year of college at Wayne State University in fall 2018, it’s helping her achieve a childhood dream.
Inspiring and empowering students to prepare for college and academic success through immersive explorations of STEM and health fields has earned Wayne State’s C2 Pipeline program recognition unlike any other in the nation.
The program, which is sponsored by the Wayne State College of Nursing and funded through the Michigan Department of Education's 21st Century Community Learning Center grant, was recently awarded AdvancEd STEM Certification. AdvancEd is a non-profit, non-partisan school credentialing organization that also studies STEM curriculum standards and supports continuous assessment and improvement in educational efforts to meet real world career needs and demands.
Dr. Ramona Benkert and colleague Belinda Aberle were recently awarded a $2.6 million Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) Nurse Education, Practice, Quality and Retention (NEPQR) grant to help do just that. Benkert’s proposal, “Primary Care-Community Health Immersion Program in Detroit (PC-Chip in the D),” received four years of funding to address these training gaps. The proposal includes a sustainability plan that will ensure the continuation of activities beyond federal funding.
The Wayne State University College of Nursing recently received substantial endowment funds from Dr. Virginia Hill Rice (‘65) to establish an annual lectureship on nursing science and healthcare. “Dr. Hill’s generous endowment recognizes the stature of the work done in the college,” said Dean Laurie M. Lauzon Clabo.