The Wisconsin Action Coalition comprised of the Wisconsin Center for Nursing and the Rural Wisconsin Health Cooperative is among 10 organizations that will receive up to $25,000 each for new or ongoing work that addresses nursing’s role in building health equity, well-being, and promoting a Culture of Health, announced the Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action, an initiative of AARP Foundation, AARP, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). All 2020 Nursing Innovation Fund awardees secured dollar to dollar matching funds from a variety of partners, including local county fire and emergency services, a state beef council, United Way, local foundations, health and hospital systems, universities and individual donors, to name a few.
RWJF defines health equity as “everyone has a fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible. This requires removing obstacles to health such as poverty, discrimination, and their consequences, including powerlessness and lack of access to good jobs with fair pay, quality education and housing, safe environments and health care.”
The Campaign’s Nursing Innovations Fund was created in 2018 to support work for its state-based Action Coalitions and allies that inform and influence policy, produce replicable strategies that place nurses in positions as essential partners in providing care, and strategically involve a diversity of stakeholders. The competition was limited to the Action Coalitions or organizations designated by Action Coalitions and required applicants to raise funds to match the award dollars. We thank Bader Philanthropies for providing the required match which advanced our proposal.
In addition to the award in Wisconsin, the Campaign announced that Action Coalitions or their designees in Arkansas and Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky, Nebraska, North Carolina, Pennsylvania Washington, West Virginia, and Wyoming received awards.
“We are proud to be selected for our project, Wisconsin Nurses Respond Now which is an online priority training program for nurses caring for vulnerable populations with COVID-19. We look forward to building on our work to transform nursing in order to improve health, healthcare, and build health equity,” said Barbra Nichols, PhD(H), MS, RN, FAAN and Tim Size, Wisconsin Action Coalition co-leads.