Decades after she began nursing her local community at a storefront clinic in Roxbury, Mass., Gloria Harris Cater, PhD, MDiv, FNP, is still serving her community—but now she does it as a volunteer with the Massachusetts Action Coalition, a state affiliate of the Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action, a national initiative of AARP Foundation, AARP and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to build a healthier America through nursing.
This summer, she convened three events at the Mattapan branch of the Boston Public Library to help older adults lead healthier lives. At one of them, August’s “Food and Fitness” program, which drew more than a dozen area residents, Cater joined in some chair yoga.
A former dean of the Division of Nursing and Health Sciences at Roxbury Community College, Cater co-leads the Massachusetts Action Coalition’s Culture of Health committee, which conceived the program. The Action Coalition sees library systems as fertile ground for spreading health knowledge and hopes to replicate the Mattapan events throughout the commonwealth.
Cater was motivated to join the Action Coalition in 2015 because increasing diversity in nursing was on the Campaign for Action agenda.
“My nursing passions have been community health and diversity,” she says. “Those things keep me rolling.”
So does her faith. Cater became an ordained minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2010 and, for seven years, volunteered as a health minister at her church. As part of its nurses’ unit, she trained other church members in first aid and increased health awareness through educational events and one-on-one conversations.
“I feel that health has three components: spiritual, physical, and mental,” she says. “People with a strong spiritual grounding seem to do better with their physical and mental health.”
This belief, formed over several decades of nursing, was supported by Cater’s PhD research on the connection between faith and type 2 diabetes in African-Americans. Today her volunteer activities include leading her own parish just north of Boston.
This photo essay was created for the "Encore Performance: Retired Nurses Find Fulfillment Through Volunteering" article developed by Charting Nursing's Future for use by the Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action.
Credits:
Captions: Nicole Fauteux Photos: Katy Rogers