A Nurse First

Stay the course

• Sigma Nursing • Season 5 • Episode 2

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When faced with adversity and inequality, Patricia Coleman-Burns had the choice to accept the status quo or take a stand and work toward change. In her case, the injustice she experienced in the workplace fueled her passion for advocacy and breaking barriers in nursing for others, creating unmatched positive change in her community.

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So many people as an activist today would ask me, what was the pivotal point in my life that put me on a road of activism? I graduated from Wayne State in 1969. With my degree, 1969, in communications and rhetoric, I thought I was all of that. And I went and applied to Motown Records for a job. So remember, Dr. King had been assassinated in 68. I graduated in 69. A movement all over the country. What I learned was that even in a predominantly Black company, women were second-class citizens. And my boss, who was an amazing man, who was one of the speechwriters for Dr. King, he left Detroit to move to California. And they were looking for a director to replace him. And he says to me, very nice man, just brilliant. He was not as educated as I was, but he was a man. And he says to me, well, we're looking for a director to come in and run this office. And I need you, Pat, to teach him everything you know." I said, I want that job. He said, Well, no, we're looking that the man that we're looking at has a family and a wife and children, and you're just a single woman. And I said, Hmm, something wrong with that. Something wrong with that thinking. And so I left and went back and got my master's and my doctorate and began to organize around women's issues. Welcome to A Nurse First. This is Patricia Coleman-Burns One would think it would be in terms of Black awareness, but it was in terms of women and Black women awareness. It put me on the road, really was coming out of graduation and the death of Dr. King and all of the issues around the civil rights movement, thinking that my inspiration and my aspiration would be around the Black movement, but having that experience at Motown made me understand the intersectionality, right, of being a woman and Black, and that I could not separate who I was, that in fact, there were many things in place to advance the Black cause, but that we were a burgeoning, emerging sense of womanhood for this, whatever wave of feminism this was, that it made it, it set me on a pathway that has not ceased in all of these years. It was Motown and my experience there. The chauvinism and male domination and supremacy ideas was the key for who I am and how I proceeded from there. When I left Motown and went back to school to get my master's, I can't even remember how, but I was selected to have a graduate, what we would call, it wasn't a fellowship because I had to teach, had to. But then that was my first experience teaching. So I taught speech because that was my degree. I created the first ever course in black women in white America, which often many of the women that would come to my courses were victims. of domestic violence. And so the other women would send them to my course so that we could lift their heads. I got started trying to help women understand their value, the history of struggle, and the choices that they could make. But at the same time, There had been founded on Wayne State's campus, the Center for Black Studies that taught black social and political thought, male-female relationships. So I did the political aspect of the movement. It was an elective. It was not required. So you had to really want to be there. And what I learned in that period was to be myself. I learned how to stand up for myself, how to be data-driven, how to be prepared, how to be clear, and as well as the strength that I learned and gained around teaching. How to take people from where they were, to give them a vision of who they could be, and to show them how to get there. And so around 1989, the students were in the same kind of period that we find ourselves, the notion of defunding or cutting the budgets of black studies. I mean, we're in the same period right now. And of course, you know, I wasn't worried, but the students came to me and they said, they're going to cut our budget. We're not having it. And then on, I guess, April of 1989, They came to me and they said, Dr. Coleman-Burns, we're going to take over the university and we're just letting you know. I said, okay, all righty. And so they took over Helen Newberry Joy for 11 days. My husband and I were in there with them for 11 days. to make sure that they were at the highest level of their own integrity. We had lectures and study-ins and all these things, because what they wanted was, instead of a center, a degree-granting department. And I was on the negotiating team because I believed, you know, that we could all come to this. We could compromise and figure out between the powers that be and these students with a mutual resolution. Now, I was well known by the president of the university because of my work on women. And so I was his first chair of the president's commission on the status of women. And so he was like, why are you in here? I said, these are our students. We should not harm. We should listen to them, make sure that they are given the correct information. that they are not subject to outside forces, that they are supported. And so all of the conditions that the students wanted were granted. We moved from a Center for Black Studies to a Department of Africana Studies, and I think they got five tenure-track Much to her surprise, the positive changes in the department did not translate into positive outcomes for her career. In fact, shortly after resolving the sit-in, Patricia One of the provosts of the university came to me and we had lunch and she said, you know, there's no place for you here. I said, OK, thank you. And he said to me, well, Pat, why did you, why did you, he thought that I had started the sit-in. I said, no, I didn't think of it, but had I thought of it, it sounded like a good idea. I went to Bryn Mawr for either six weeks, some amount of time, to be trained as an administrator. And I learned so much. It was the best thing I ever experienced. I learned about all of the issues around budgets and structures. When I got back from that, a position was posted for Director of the Office of Minority Affairs in the School of Nursing. And I said, I'm ready. I'm ready for this. And I applied and got it. It was under Rita Duma, who was the first and only black dean of nursing at the University of Michigan. And she hired me as the director of the Office of Minority Affairs. It was a dream job. The first thing, when I was hired by Rita, she had several grants that were high school focused. The biggest part was the student part, my Genesis Project. We would bring students to campus for six weeks. They would come, and we would assign them to nurse researchers, nurses who were doing research. And they would come for six weeks, and we'd do the programming, and they would be mentored by some of our researchers who were doing animal models. It was just an amazing thing. The problem with that was they had to live in the Ann Arbor area. because nobody could be committed to every day coming to Ann Arbor. And so we did that for a couple of years, or I continued that work for a couple of years until Rita retired. And so the idea was, well, we have this summer program. What if we bring, find more and more from Detroit? I hired this young woman and she would go to Detroit and meet up with the parents and they drop the kids off at a spot and she would drive them every day for six weeks to the Ann Arbor campus so that we could expand, extend our borders beyond just the area where the parents could bring them to the school. And so we had one of the first cohorts of students out of Detroit that would come and spent six weeks with us to learn about life on the campus, to learn about nursing. They didn't know what nursing, everybody thought nursing was simply help make, you know. They didn't understand nursing and that it was research and stuff like that. And then the next time she says, let's put them in the dorms. So we spent the next years bringing high schools rising or seniors and 11th graders to a two-week residential program in nursing. We use the concept as a new beginning. This is a new beginning. There was an acronym around a new beginning, gaining excellence in nursing education and the SIS could be scholarship or science and it evolved over the various years. that it was a new beginning for young folk who were told if they were so smart, they should go into medicine. Or, you know, if they showed any interest in nursing, they were taken out of the sciences. They were taken out of math and put in vocational programs, which we don't have a problem with, but that wasn't what we were needing. We needed folk with strong science backgrounds, strong math backgrounds, who could come in, do the research, also evolve to the highest level of their education. It was the most amazing thing, all those people in the upper part of Michigan, bringing them in, in the rural communities, because we knew that we needed nurses to go back into those communities in order that the people would have good health. So I saw myself as a pioneer. I kept pushing that it wasn't about admissions, because they would admit the students and then blame the students when they couldn't succeed. I felt that that was something that nursing could benefit from, understanding that students who come from low income school districts that did not have AP and may not have had access to certain resources, whether they were in urban areas or rural areas, that they really had The capabilities, if we gave them head starts, if we gave them information on how to be successful, they would. People thought that I was out of my mind. I had faculty in the early years that when I was doing peer facilitated study groups, they would say, I would say, could you send your students to my study groups? But I need them to come at the beginning. of the semester, so they can get the core ideas. And I had faculty say, oh, Pat, when they fail their first exam, then they'll come. And I was like, that's too late. Because then you're talking about remediation, and I'm talking about how to build, how to learn the tools of success that allow you to be successful. I saw myself as leading to that. The whole notion of looking at the wholeness of students, not just them in the classroom, but providing support for them. And often I had to fight with the university that the money that I would give them would be additional because what the tendency Every year, if I gave them money, they wanted to take it out of their financial aid package. And I'd say, no. They need this because they may not have a car to get to clinical. When students, we require they have scrubs and that they have stethoscopes and all. Who's paying for that? These are not wealthy kids. And so getting folk to begin to see the social determinants of health, even, or the social determinants, not only in health care, but in the lives of our students. was extremely important. Again, to give them opportunities to learn how to be successful was key. Now we know the importance of mental health and we know the importance of meeting social needs. So now we have a whole office called the Center for Educational Outreach. They often talk about Genesis. We have all of these programs that come from the hard work that many of us did. in the early years. Even over in the medical school, they even have an office of diversity, equity, inclusion. We are now in the process, in fact today, of pulling all the Genesis scholars back together to see where they are, what they've accomplished, what did they end up doing, because they're everywhere. They're absolutely everywhere. We've made a difference. So I'm most proud of the impact that we have had through the Genesis Project in nursing, both as a discipline and as a profession. So these nursing scholars, their At the 2023 biennial convention, Sigma honored you with honorary membership to acknowledge your sustained impact on nursing and health care. What does You know, Probably one of my greatest challenges over the years is when it was beneficial to some, they would say, well, you're not a nurse. And with all the contributions that I've made to nursing, not to my own field of rhetoric, but to nursing, that probably has been one of the biggest blows. You know, that just hurts. And it hurts when, over the years, many non-nurses have come in and gotten tenure and promotions. And most often, I have not been recognized in that regard. So Ann Krzyzewski was the first for our local chapter recognizing the work that I had done in Genesis. I was just so proud, so proud that the work had been appreciated. And then for the national, the international society, I mean, you know, it's almost making me an ex officio nurse in a way has been phenomenal. The award and making me an honorary member, you know, it's always places where People like me, people of color, women, we've been excluded from some of the most prestigious societies for whatever reason. We don't take women, we don't take this, we don't. And to be an honorary, to be offered an honorary membership is phenomenal. It is the epitome of all the work that I've done in nursing since 1991. I do want to emphasize the role of Sigma Theta Tau as an international organization in continuing to really advance the role of nurses to meet and address the health care disparities and needs of our communities. It's important for nursing to constantly figure out how it can make a unique impact in the lives of the people they serve. And I know nurses can do it. You have brought so many of your big ideas to life, regardless of the situation and despite people telling you it can't be done. How do you avoid feeling So my friend, Susan, she was probably the most impactful in my nursing professional career. And we would talk about the whole hockey thing. Don't look at where the puck is, but look at where it's going. And that would be one of the biggest things. You cannot be locked into what is. People will always tell you, this is the way we do it. This is the way it's been done. Oh, we've tried that before. We can't do that. There is no such thing as we can't. We just have to figure out how to do it. So looking at where we're going, where is the world going to be? What do you want it to be as we move to the forward? And what does it take for you to get there? I think the other thing is to understand that a vision that I have is probably not given to anybody else. And the danger of that is I said that people will say, well, we've never done it that way. But don't let anybody take your dream from you. It's not their dream. It's yours. It's yours. And nobody sees it the way you see it. Nobody. You can build it and share it. And perhaps people will catch fire, catch the fire. But more than likely, you'll have to carry this baby by yourself. until it's ready to be birthed. Stay the course. There is no problem that we cannot solve. Stay the course. Know that a vision that you have is yours. Other people may not see it. They may not understand it, but it's yours and it's yours. And if it was given to you, that means you have the ability and capability to make it happen. We do not have to compete against each other. We live in a world that says, if I succeed, you can't. But what if all of us do? What if all of us are able to bring together our bestest selves and our wildest dreams and are Thank you for listening to A Nurse First from Sigma. If you loved this episode, do us a favor and subscribe, rate, and leave us a review. It is very much appreciated. For more information about A Nurse First and Sigma, visit