Jonas Center Spotlight Jonas Center's Kelly Mahoney Attends PIN Grant Conference
Our Grants Program Manager, Kelly Mahoney, recently attended the Partners Investing in Nursing’s Future (PIN) annual grant conference in New Mexico. In her blog post she summarizes the Jonas Center’s involvement with PIN, and touches upon some takeaways and highlights from the conference. Read on for more information.
At the foot of the Sandia Mountains outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico, the Partners Investing in Nursing’s Future (PIN) annual meeting convened last week, bringing together hundreds of nurses and funding partners from across the country. Along with our grant partners from New York City and North Carolina, I attended to represent the Jonas Center for our second PIN grant, an extension of the Multi-Regional Model to Increase the Proportion of Baccalaureate Nurses in the US (RIBN) program.
Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and administered by the Northwest Health Foundation, the PIN program aims to support the capacity, involvement and leadership of local foundations to advance the nursing profession in their own communities. The effort is unique in that it provides funding to local foundations (who typically have not previously funded nursing initiatives) with the agreement that the foundation will provide its own funding to match. As the name implies, it is truly a program focused on partnership.
The Jonas Center received its first PIN grant in 2008 to support efforts to increase the number of baccalaureate-prepared nurses in New York City and North Carolina, two sites expressly chosen to offer both an urban and a rural case study. Both pilots were launched with great success and the project proved even more relevant in light of the 2010 IOM Future of Nursing report’s recommendation to increase the percentage of BSN nurses to 80% by 2020. As a result, the Jonas Center committed to fund an expansion of the program over the next three years. Going forward, continued support from the Jonas Center and PIN will allow the RIBN program to expand to all students in the 13 nursing programs of the City University of New York system and statewide expansion to all community college students in North Carolina, with an ultimate goal of national expansion.
The theme of this year’s conference was embracing diversity and the setting of the beautiful Santa Ana Native American Pueblo (that a pueblo is another name for a reservation was just the first of many new things I learned on my trip!) was the perfect backdrop to discuss the ever-shifting patient population and nursing workforce. Our grant team worked together on ways to effectively tell the story of our program and the importance of advancing nursing education in light of this shifting paradigm – and greatly benefited from hearing about efforts similar to ours in places like Arkansas, Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming. We met nurse leaders including Susan Hassmiller, the Senior Advisor for Nursing at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and were inspired by stories from foundations and partners on why they support nursing. With nothing in sight but mountains and trees (and no cell phone service!), it was a great place to take a break from emails and deadlines, to regroup and rediscover our shared commitment to nursing.
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