Innovative Partnership Delivers Health Services to Residents in Sacramento Promise Zone

Photo: The Community Nurse Corps with Sacramento Housing & Redevelopment Agency staff.

The Community Nurse Corps (CNC), pictured with Sacramento Housing & Redevelopment Agency staff, is a community partnership between the HUD-designated Sacramento Promise Zone (www.sacramentopromisezone.org/), Samuel Merritt University (www.samuelmerritt.edu/), and their Registered Nurse and Bachelor of Science in Nursing students. Once in the Corps, nurse scholars are placed at organizations in the Sacramento Promise Zone, where they provide health resources and services to area residents pro bono. These services include health screenings, community health and wellness referrals, mindfulness-based stress reduction, health fairs, opportunities of physical activity, health education, and community health needs assessment.

"The Community Nurse Corps is a great example of the Sacramento Promise Zone's efforts to create partner collaborations that increase impact and provide greater opportunities for the people who live in the zone," said Sacramento Promise Zone Coordinator Julius Austin. Since the CNC launched in the region in spring 2017, 50 nurse scholars have participated and logged a total of 3,655 community health hours serving the community in partnership with various community-based organizations, including: La Familia Counseling Inc., Twin Rivers/Urban Strategies Inc., Martin Luther King Technology Academy, Health Education Council Inc., and Well Space Health.

In 2019, the CNC expanded to include nursing students from other local universities such as UC Davis' School of Nursing, Sacramento State, and the University of San Francisco in Sacramento. The Promise Zone continues to engage with the nursing school consortium to provide additional students and expand services to additional community-based organizations. The CNC serves as an innovative, scalable, and replicable model of a practical educational opportunity. It provides career exploration role models for area youth and brings preventative healthcare to resource-starved communities.

Promise Zones are high-poverty communities where the federal government partners with local leaders to increase economic activity, improve educational opportunities, leverage private investment, reduce violent crime, enhance public health, and address other priorities identified by the community.

Two of these partners, La Familia Counseling and Urban Strategies, and others are promoting COVID-19 vaccine confidence. They provided a webinar on April 14, 2021.

Learn more about Promise Zones.

###