Borough of Manhattan Community College has received a $738,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under a nursing workforce diversity initiative. The three-year grant will allow BMCC to recruit prospective nursing students from disadvantaged backgrounds and to offer them scholarships and a wide range of support services.
The goal of the grant-funded program is to increase the number of skilled nurses in the region, particularly in disadvantaged neighborhoods that sorely lack trained health-care workers. The Nursing Workforce Diversity Grant allows BMCC to recruit students from neighborhoods that desperately need more trained health-care workers, and to expand the ranks of skilled nurses by recruiting more minorities into the nursing profession.
“Encouraging more people to enter the nursing profession and increasing the numbers of students who graduate from nursing programs is a priority for BMCC,” said Antonio Peréz, BMCC president and chairperson of the City University of New York Taskforce on Nursing. The taskforce issued a number of recommendations this summer.
To encourage success in the nursing program and the most direct route to graduation, students recruited into the program will participate in a summer immersion program, so they can complete their science prerequisites, and any remedial requirements before embarking on the clinical nursing sequence of courses in the fall.
The program will also offer academic enrichment activities throughout the year, tutoring, and an advisement/tutorial component.
In addition, each year, at least 40 students will receive scholarship of $2,000 each. BMCC tuition is $2,500 per year.
“The hope is that once they graduate, these students will go back to work in the neighborhoods that most need trained health care workers,” explains John Montanez, director of grants at BMCC.
