Help Support The Nurses Of Tomorrow

As President of the Wisconsin League for Nursing (WLN), we are asking for funds for the WLN to sustain our operating costs, which directly assists in the ongoing implementation of our organization’s mission and goals. The WLN is a nonprofit organization representing nurses, nursing students, agencies, and individuals interested in fostering the development and improvement of nursing care in a variety of collaborative healthcare environments. Many of our members are nursing educators in formal nursing educational programs and are nurses working for a variety of healthcare organizations providing support and ongoing professional development to practicing nurses. Simply stated, we support the professional development of nurses who in turn provide nursing care for those in need.

The WLN is an all-volunteer organization and relies on membership dues and revenues from two conferences each year. We have big goals, big visions, and big dreams for our future. We recently hired a professional management group to assist with our programming and financial needs. The new structure provides for working with our management team enables our volunteers, all nurse educators and leaders, to plan for and meet the needs of our members.

We are in the midst of a collaboration with the DAISY Foundation TM and developed a new DAISY Nurse Leader Award for Nursing Clinical Educators. We are completing a multi-year pilot phase for the implementation of the new statewide award. The purpose of the award is to provide meaningful recognition for Clinical Nursing Educators. The award bridges across institutions and offers recognition for the “nursing professionals that empower, mentor, and guide the nurses who provide exceptional patient care”.

The nursing workforce is facing enormous challenges due to the post-pandemic era, burnout, and anticipated large numbers of upcoming retirements. Nursing educators in primary nursing programs and working within healthcare environments are monumental to the formation and professional development of new nurses and contribute greatly to the retention and professional identity of working nurses across the spectrum. The new DAISY Award provides meaningful recognition and champions nurse clinical educators’ by highlighting individual contributions and significance in forming and maintaining a healthy work environment.

The WLN supports nursing along a wide continuum of practice settings from pre-licensure through graduate nursing education. Nurses experiencing increased job satisfaction are more engaged and contribute to building a healthy work environment. Nurses who are engaged in healthy work environments foster positive patient outcomes.

The WLN also provides nursing scholarships to students in pre-licensure and graduate nursing programs. We administer the scholarship program by dispersing many scholarships each year that we receive from various philanthropic organizations. We take the stewardship of these scholarship funds very seriously and need ongoing management support to continue this arm of our mission.

We anticipate continued growth in the engagement of our members due in part to the partnerships we are building within organizations but also anticipate the broader celebration of nurse educators as bringing an overall feeling of nurse empowerment and collaboration.

Traditionally healthcare institutions operate in a highly competitive and individualistic entity for the sake of the organization’s goals and bottom line. This can be understood as operating in institutional or organizational silos. As nurses adhere to our professional identity within our own supportive community, we advocate for building bridges between silos to enhance the nursing profession. For this precise reason, the WLN broadened our outreach with programming that specifically addresses the professional development needs of nurses in a variety of settings both within traditional academic nursing programs and nurses working in healthcare organizations. The WLN continues growth for our outreach that bypasses individual institutions and organizations and instead promotes professional nursing on a broader scale.

The WLN is uniquely poised to bridge and include unifying successes within and across both academic and healthcare practice settings. Together we support nurses on a statewide level.

The Wisconsin League for Nursing has been impacting the learning of nurses for the last 68 years. We are a statewide organization that is a constituent league of the National League for Nursing.  The WLN supports and implements the mission of the NLN by helping advance quality nursing education to meet the unique needs of diverse populations in an ever-changing healthcare environment at the constituent level.

There are 40 schools of Nursing in the state of Wisconsin that proudly produce thousands of nurses, in a variety of specialties.  The Wisconsin League for Nursing began to support the educators of these nurses.  Programming is built around the most up-to-date topics and trends in the industry.  Partnerships are fostered with other leaders in the field to reach one ultimate goal, better patient experiences.  

The Wisconsin League for Nursing provides conferences, workshops, networking, scholarships, mentoring, and community alliances.  Many resources are provided for sharing research, grant writing, and career planning.

No one can dispute the impact nurses have on health care.  The question is how can we continue to provide the most cutting-edge, timely, and relevant information to our members?  That's where you come in!  Help advance the training of our future nurses by supporting the educators who are preparing them for a lifetime of promoting and maintaining health.