Mission, Vision, and Values
MISSION
The mission of GROW Nurses is to reduce health disparity in Grant County through a community-wide partnership to encourage and assist local, diverse individuals to become nurses and nurse educators.
VISION
GROW Nurses will lead with excellence a community initiative to eliminate barriers to nursing and healthcare education in Grant County, Indiana. This vision is powered by innovation and community partnerships and will serve as an exemplar which can be replicated in other communities.
This vision is accomplished by:
- Inspiring talent in Grant County to enter nursing and healthcare, targeting under-represented populations.
- Creating an articulation program and socializing students to grow nurses from Health Careers to LPN to ASN to BSN and beyond.
- Recruiting, developing and mentoring faculty.
- Shaping response to current and future needs of healthcare providers in Grant County through practice innovations and partnerships.
- Transparency and open communication among partners moving toward a shared vision.
- Rapid communication of ideas to generate further sharing and creativity toward this vision. Communication will focus on diverse publications through local and practice venues.
Our plan is to bring prospective students into the healthcare educational system and then have them progress in a stair-step fashion through an LPN program to an ASN program at a local community college and then on to an RNBSN program and beyond. The marketing plan will underscore the message that the community is coming together to meet the needs of the unemployed and the underemployed and is addressing the nursing shortage. Additional strategies include student-specific individual educational plans for Health Careers, LPN and ASN students to ensure success. We envision a number of students going beyond to receive graduate degrees and to contributing as faculty members to educate the next generation of nurses.
Educational partners in the program include the Marion Community Schools Health Careers program, the Transition ASN Program of Ivy Tech Community College, and the Bachelor of Science Program and the Master of Science in Nursing and Doctoral programs at Indiana Wesleyan University (IWU). Becky Allen-Gull, MSN, RN serves as the Director of GROW Nurses to bring the various partners together in an effective, successful cooperative. The director’s role is to develop the marketing plan; design and implement programs to socialize new and current nurses to the expectation of life-long learning and life calling approaches to vocation; develop a plan to successfully replicate the program in other communities; and design programs to recruit and retain nursing faculty in the community, including evidence-based new faculty orientation programs, evidence-based faculty mentoring programs; and student counseling programs. One of the primary strategies for the first year was the development of an articulation plan between the education partners so that students can progress in a seamless manner from LPN to ASN to BSN to MSN and DNP levels.
Indiana Wesleyan University (IWU) is the sponsoring agency and will take the lead in this consortium of education, healthcare and community partners. IWU is located in Marion, Indiana. IWU is a co-educational, liberal arts university affiliated with The Wesleyan Church. GROW Nurses will lead with excellence a community initiative to eliminate barriers to nursing education in Grant County. This vision is powered by innovation and community partnerships.
VALUES
GROW Nurses share optimism for overcoming some of the challenges of the underserved population in our county. We share a mutual respect and trust for each other and are passionate about breaking the cycle of poverty in our community. The mutual understanding among the educational partners is one of collaboration rather than competition.
Through creative teamwork, the GROW partners strive to provide value-added programming to inspire juniors and seniors in the Grant County School’s Health Careers Class to consider nursing and healthcare as a career.
GROW Nurses provides career counseling and mentoring to empower students to make a commitment to succeed. GROW Nurses places great emphasis on the need for integrity and professionalism for those choosing a nursing or healthcare career. By stressing accountability and responsibility, GROW Nurses encourages students to achieve career goals that can change the course of their lives and break the cycle of poverty they may be experiencing in their families.
Sir William Watson in his poem, The Lost Light, ends with these words. “Of all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are those, ‘It might have been!’ ” GROW Nurses is committed to helping to prevent some “It might have been[s].”