Engaging Diverse Communities and Promoting Health

Our Strategic Priorities

1. 

   Implement a core set of principles and values that signal our commitment to a diverse, inclusive, and respectful environment that translates to our work in our communities.
2. Develop and enhance student and faculty competency and capacity to contribute to global health equity (with an emphasis on middle and low resource countries in the Latin American and Caribbean region).
3. Create innovative models for community and civic engagement that are preeminent in advancing education, practice, and research while improving social equity and advancing human welfare.

The Path Forward

Penn Nursing has long embraced social justice as one of its core values. We recently heightened our efforts to create a strategy for more tangible, far-reaching results. Our ultimate goal is to serve as a model for other nursing educators and the nursing community at-large—adopting actions that are sustainable and measurable across education, policy, and practice.

Additionally, our research and clinical expertise benefits those who live and work in communities all around us. These communities in turn help us to truly understand what we seek to learn in the classroom, lab, and clinical setting.

Social justice and community engagement influence how we communicate, translate, and apply nursing knowledge. We are committed to incorporating social justice into our teaching practice and community engagement to improve health and promote positive social change in Philadelphia and around the world. Goal: $7M over five years.

The Nursing Social Justice Project: Penn Nursing is seeking to launch the Nursing Social Justice Project to implement strategies across nursing education, research, and practice to address social and other inequities in health and health care, while serving our communities. Our ultimate goal is transform the landscape of diversity, equity, and inclusion for nursing, and by extension, the entire health care profession via targeted initiatives and ongoing community engagement.

Sample giving opportunities that comprise the Nursing Social Justice Project:

Social Justice Education

An anti-racism curriculum immersion/infusion, social justice fellowships, anti-bias training for students, faculty, and staff ,and funding to critically examine and address how structural barriers to health will transform how we prepare nurses, improving care delivery.

Scholarships

Financial aid for first-generation and underrepresented students is an evergreen priority.

Research

To improve the lives of under-represented individuals and communities and improve health and wellness for all people, we need to build the most diverse faculty and support research that addresses structural racism.

Faculty Support

Endowed and term chairs as well as visiting professorships with a social justice bent are critical to the Nursing Social Justice Project.