When one considers an all-nurse membership and caring for others being inherent within our profession, plus the motto of MUSNAVC – “Never Stop Serving,” it is only fitting that we would support an outreach type program.  In 2020, our previous MUSNAVC president, Jeri Graham thought that due to the COVID pandemic, MUSNAVC should reach out to our members to see how they were doing. This initial outreach was known as the “Buddy” program – reaching out to our “buddies” to see if they were Ok. The outreach calls by Jeri were very well received. Then during 2021 as we all are aware, our nation was certainly impacted by multiple natural disaster events. Again, under Jeri’s leadership several of us reached out once the disaster event was stabilized, to those members we identified in the disaster affected areas to ensure our members were Ok or if they needed any assistance.  Once again, this outreach was well received and often during these calls we identified from our members that some were also having some personal challenges. We continued these “buddy” calls throughout 2022.

 

For 2023, we are officially changing this outreach initiative title from “Buddy” program to a “We Care” program. This initiative is in its infancy, but some thoughts would be to not only reach out to our members during disaster events affecting their areas but to also consider advocacy in other venues such as those with personal, medical, or isolation challenges.  These outreach actions can be in the form of phone calls, cards, letters, emails etc.  Of course, this outreach would only occur with the members approval.

 

To even out potential workload for this outreach initiative, we divided the outreach response area as west and east of the Mississippi. Currently we have for the western portion of the United States, Sherry Hoyt Cline and Pat Chappell; for the eastern portion we have Rosemary Durning and Ann Devers.  However, if this program grows, we would certainly be looking to others to volunteer for coordination of some of the outreach activities as applicable to their respective geographical area.

 

 

We welcome any feedback from all of you in terms of if you think this “We Care” outreach initiative is a good idea and if so, perhaps other potential outreach topics that might be beneficial to our membership. We also would love for more members to participate in this outreach initiative especially if this program grows.  So please, if you are interested in making “we care” calls or would like to receive periodical calls, complete the form below and we will be in contact.  Thank you for Never Stop Serving.