From serving as a Peace Corps nurse in Africa to teaching nursing and midwifery in Tanzania to serving as Deputy Chief Nursing Officer for Seed Global Health, Linda Jacobsen, CNM, CFNP, MPH is a true example of taking the passion of caring for women and families to communities around the globe.
Linda Jacobsen recently returned to the U.S. after serving for a year teaching nursing and midwifery in Tanzania as part of the inaugural class of the Global Health Service Partnership (GHSP) volunteers. The GHSP program, a unique public-private partnership between the U.S. Peace Corps, the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), and Seed Global Health, places U.S. physicians and nurses on faculties at medical and nursing schools in Malawi, Tanzania and Uganda, to support educational capacity development aimed at long-term health system strengthening. Since ending her service, Linda has become a Deputy Chief Nursing Officer for Seed Global Health in which she helps to recruit and train new nursing volunteers for service.
While Linda was a Peace Corps nurse in Africa in the late 1970s, she experienced a crisis when delivering pre-term twins, which motivated her to study midwifery. She then sought out other midwives who worked abroad, and found that many studied and served with Frontier Nursing Service (FNS) and were trained to provide comprehensive care. So Linda returned to the US and continued her education in a cohort of ten nurse-midwives who trained and served with FNS in 1983-1984. Three graduates from her class were involved in international nursing and continue to support each other in their leadership roles. Leaders like Kitty Ernst and FNS Dean, Ruth Stevens, fostered professionalism and trained the students to meet challenges successfully, which became a life-long habit of Linda’s.
Linda and her classmates forged leadership roles wherever they served in their careers. After training at FNS and earning her masters at University of Washington School of Public Health, Linda served in U.S. public health programs, primarily in rural and underserved areas in the state of Washington, while she raised a family. She has been a clinician, family planning consultant, public health program manager, clinical preceptor and implemented a project that integrated HIV screening in Title X family planning clinics.
When their children left for college, Linda and her husband searched for an opportunity to serve together in Africa and discovered the GHSP program. As Seed Global Health’s Deputy Chief Nursing Officer, she returned to Tanzania in November 2014 to mentor current GHSP volunteers serving in the field. In Tanzania, nurses train at the diploma or bachelors level and learn midwifery in their standard nursing program.
Remembering her years at Frontier, Linda recalled working from district centers, visiting families in log cabins, and escorting sick patients from remote areas as part of ambulance transport teams. She remembers the hospitality and warm manners of the people in the Kentucky mountain communities and found that similarly, people in Tanzania are also very gracious and reach out to form relationships with each other. Due to a lack of resources, Tanzanian patients tend to come for care more acutely ill than rural U.S. patients. Women are especially vulnerable; only about half those who are pregnant actually make the targeted four prenatal visits, and many are not tested for HIV because they don’t have access to testing facilities.
Trained healthcare workers in Tanzania are in short supply, and even medical centers must ration resources. However, Linda was encouraged to see, when observing student presentations in a village, that the students engaged with the villagers and leaders about how their needs might be addressed and that the villagers responded by bringing the nurses food. There, as in Kentucky, addressing patient and rural community needs at the local level is vital to promote overall health. Linda is proud to be a FNU graduate with international experience, and pointed out that FNU graduates are willing to make difference where there are huge needs for health care.
Carrie Belin is an experienced board-certified Family Nurse Practitioner and a graduate of the Johns Hopkins DNP program, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Georgetown University School of Nursing, and Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. She has also completed fellowships at Georgetown and the University of California Irvine.
Angie has been a full-scope midwife since 2009. She has experience in various birth settings including home, hospital, and birth centers. She is committed to integrating the midwifery model of care in the US. She completed her master’s degree in nurse-midwifery at Frontier Nursing University (FNU) and her Doctorate at Johns Hopkins University. She currently serves as the midwifery clinical faculty at FNU. Angie is motivated by the desire to improve the quality of healthcare and has led quality improvement projects on skin-to-skin implementation, labor induction, and improving transfer of care practices between hospital and community midwives. In 2017, she created a short film on skin-to-skin called 
Justin C. Daily, BSN, RN, has ten years of experience in nursing. At the start of his nursing career, Justin worked as a floor nurse on the oncology floor at St. Francis. He then spent two years as the Director of Nursing in a small rural Kansas hospital before returning to St. Francis and the oncology unit. He has been in his current position as the Chemo Nurse Educator for the past four years. He earned an Associate in Nurse from Hutchinson Community College and a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from Bethel College.
Brandy Jackson serves as the Director of Undergraduate Nursing Programs and Assistant Educator at Wichita State University and Co-Director of Access in Nursing. Brandy is a seasoned educator with over 15 years of experience. Before entering academia, Brandy served in Hospital-based leadership and Critical Care Staff nurse roles. Brandy is passionate about equity in nursing education with a focus on individuals with disabilities. Her current research interests include accommodations of nursing students with disabilities in clinical learning environments and breaking down barriers for historically unrepresented individuals to enter the nursing profession. Brandy is also actively engaged in Interprofessional Education development, creating IPE opportunities for faculty and students at Wichita State. Brandy is an active member of Wichita Women for Good and Soroptimist, with the goal to empower women and girls. Brandy is a TeamSTEPPS master trainer. She received the DASIY Award for Extraordinary Nursing Faculty in 2019 at Wichita State University. 
Dr. Sabrina Ali Jamal-Eddine is an Arab-disabled queer woman of color with a PhD in Nursing and an interdisciplinary certificate in Disability Ethics from the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). Dr. Jamal-Eddine’s doctoral research explored spoken word poetry as a form of critical narrative pedagogy to educate nursing students about disability, ableism, and disability justice. Dr. Jamal-Eddine now serves as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in UIC’s Department of Disability and Human Development and serves on the Board of Directors of the National Organization of Nurses with Disabilities (NOND). During her doctoral program, Sabrina served as a Summer Fellow at a residential National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute at Arizona State University (2023), a summer fellow at Andrew W. Mellon’s National Humanities Without Walls program at University of Michigan (2022), a Summer Research Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute (2021), and an Illinois Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental and related Disabilities (LEND) trainee (2019-2020).
Vanessa Cameron works for Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nursing Education & Professional Development. She is also attending George Washington University and progressing towards a PhD in Nursing with an emphasis on ableism in nursing. After becoming disabled in April 2021, Vanessa’s worldview and perspective changed, and a recognition of the ableism present within healthcare and within the culture of nursing was apparent. She has been working since that time to provide educational foundations for nurses about disability and ableism, provide support for fellow disabled nursing colleagues, and advocate for the disabled community within healthcare settings to reduce disparities.
Dr. Lucinda Canty is a certified nurse-midwife, Associate Professor of Nursing, and Director of the Seedworks Health Equity in Nursing Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing from Columbia University, a master’s degree from Yale University, specializing in nurse-midwifery, and a PhD from the University of Connecticut. Dr. Canty has provided reproductive health care for over 29 years. Her research interests include the prevention of maternal mortality and severe maternal morbidity, reducing racial and ethnic health disparities in reproductive health, promoting diversity in nursing, and eliminating racism in nursing and midwifery.
Dr. Lisa Meeks is a distinguished scholar and leader whose unwavering commitment to inclusivity and excellence has significantly influenced the landscape of health professions education and accessibility. She is the founder and executive director of the DocsWithDisabilities Initiative and holds appointments as an Associate Professor in the Departments of Learning Health Sciences and Family Medicine at the University of Michigan.
Dr. Nikia Grayson, DNP, MSN, MPH, MA, CNM, FNP-C, FACNM (she/her) is a trailblazing force in reproductive justice, blending her expertise as a public health activist, anthropologist, and family nurse-midwife to champion the rights and health of underserved communities. Graduating with distinction from Howard University, Nikia holds a bachelor’s degree in communications and a master’s degree in public health. Her academic journey also led her to the University of Memphis, where she earned a master’s in medical anthropology, and the University of Tennessee, where she achieved both a master’s in nursing and a doctorate in nursing practice. Complementing her extensive education, she completed a post-master’s certificate in midwifery at Frontier Nursing University.
Dr. Tia Brown McNair is the Vice President in the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Student Success and Executive Director for the Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation (TRHT) Campus Centers at the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) in Washington, DC. She oversees both funded projects and AAC&U’s continuing programs on equity, inclusive excellence, high-impact practices, and student success. McNair directs AAC&U’s Summer Institutes on High-Impact Practices and Student Success, and TRHT Campus Centers and serves as the project director for several AAC&U initiatives, including the development of a TRHT-focused campus climate toolkit. She is the lead author of From Equity Talk to Equity Walk: Expanding Practitioner Knowledge for Racial Justice in Higher Education (January 2020) and Becoming a Student-Ready College: A New Culture of Leadership for Student Success (July 2016 and August 2022 Second edition).