Tecla Linn & Nelia Laroza Memorial Award

I grew up in Regent Park and have been involved in social activism. Prior to nursing, I worked as a summer student at the Christian Resource Centre and facilitated human rights workshops for Toronto Community Housing. Nursing attracted me because it is a challenging, compassionate human-oriented profession. Registered nurses acquire an education that touches on pharmacology, communications, ethics and physiology among many other subjects. It’s rare for a profession to require its practitioners to be competent in such multidisciplinary fields. Nursing is a dynamic profession and nurses make in a difference in many settings. Some nurses focus in mental health, others in primary care, and others in hospitals. Yet in every setting and regardless of the setting, nurses act similarly to make a difference by putting patients first.

In a profession like this, I could never get bored. I also love the human aspect of nursing. Nursing involves compassion and caring at the very front lines of health care. Nurses are privileged to work with patients at often critical and pivotal moments in their lives and when they are feeling most vulnerable. I consider it a privilege to get to care for people when they are at a vulnerable place in their life journey. Nursing offers me a window into what really matters. I will use this scholarship to further my education in nursing and I thank CNF for their generosity to students such as myself.