As the saying goes, “Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” Assuming that is true, then Carol Greenlee, CNM (Class 13) has never had to work, though the 1,315 babies she has helped deliver might think differently.
“I wanted to be a nurse ever since I could talk,” said Greenlee, who grew up in Papillion, Nebraska, a suburb of Omaha. “When some of my friends played, they wanted to play teacher, but I wanted to play nurse.”
She has been “playing nurse” ever since she got her associate degree in nursing in 1973 at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC). She went on to earn her bachelor’s degree at UNMC in 1987.
“I tell people I’m a very slow learner,” Greenlee joked about the time span between her ADN and BSN. “We moved to Lincoln, and I worked at St. Elizabeth. I wanted to get my bachelor’s degree, and the hospital would pay for 1 class every semester. So I took one class every semester.”
After her son was born in 1974, she returned from maternity leave and noticed that there was an opening in labor and delivery. The rest is history.
“Once I got into labor and delivery, I was hooked,” Greenlee said.
She and her husband, who was a teacher, moved to Grand Island, Nebraska, where Greenlee worked as a nurse for 15 years and also taught at the community college. She began pursuing a master’s degree from UNMC, but the three-hour drive took too much time away from her family, and she dropped out. Instead, her desire to learn led her to consider midwifery.
“Working in labor and delivery, I knew about midwives, but I never had met a midwife. I had only read about them,” Greenlee said. “I met a doctor from Lincoln and he said, ‘why don’t you work in our office in Lincoln, and you can go to midwifery school at Frontier’. My husband had just finished his master’s degree so we went back to Lincoln and I worked in their office part time, while I went to midwifery school at Frontier. I was in class 13.”
Fellow Nebraska resident Nancy Peterson was in the same class with Greenlee. Together they were the first FNU students to do their clinicals in Nebraska. Greenlee worked in an OBGYN office in Lincoln from 1998-2014.
When her youngest child, Emily, graduated from college and moved away, Greenlee realized it was time to make a change.
“I decided I couldn’t work 70- or 80-hour weeks and be the kind of grandma I wanted to be. My oldest daughter said, ‘why don’t you move out here (to Salt Lake City)?’,” Greenlee said. “So, we moved to Salt Lake City, and I practiced out there in a birth center until 2019.”
Greenlee retired in 2019, but her retirement was short-lived. She returned to Nebraska in 2021and soon was back at work.
“I came home to Nebraska and the governor was advertising for nurses to come out of retirement,” she said. “ So I went back to work as a nurse in a midwife’s office for a while. Then I taught nursing students at Wesleyan University in Lincoln.”
In her work with the Lincoln Lancaster Health Department, she makes home visits to new mothers and babies.
“I think I have a good background for making home visits to new mothers and babies,” Greenlee said, noting that she works an average of three or four days a month. “I’m 73 and I’m still working and I love it.”
One of the main messages Greenlee passes along to her expectant mothers is that they have all the strength they need and she is just there to assist them.
“One of the things that has driven me in my career is I want everybody to feel strong and capable about birth,” she said. “I want moms to feel strong and capable because when their baby acts up and they don’t know what to do, they can rely on the fact that they are strong and capable instead of thinking, ‘now I need somebody to rescue me again’. I tell the mothers, ‘you already showed us that you can handle this because you already grew another human being.’”
In addition to advocating for her patients, Greenlee is an avid advocate for change in Nebraska, where certified nurse-midwives are not allowed to perform home births and cannot be licensed without a practice agreement with a physician. Greenlee testified before the state legislator committee last spring.
“I thought I had some perspective because I’ve practiced in a state that had legal home birth legal,” Greenlee said of her time in Utah. “I felt like I was in a unique position to address that issue to Nebraska, but the American Medical Association and the American Hospital Association have big lobbies that always testify against us. But I think we’re getting very close to getting it passed. We’ve been working on it for longer than I’ve been a midwife.”
Greenlee reflects fondly on her career and on her time at Frontier.
“Frontier is doing an incredible thing. The huge majority of midwives in Nebraska are from Frontier. I loved it there,” said Greenlee, who has caught three of her grandchildren. “I have loved every minute of my career in nursing and midwifery. Sometimes there got to be too many minutes, but I loved every minute.”
“I have loved every minute of my career in nursing and midwifery. Sometimes there got to be too many minutes, but I loved every minute.”
Frontier Nursing University offers a graduate Nurse-Midwifery specialty track that can be pursued full- or part-time while completing a Master of Science in Nursing or a Post-Graduate Certificate. To learn more about FNU’s online Nurse-Midwifery education program, visit our website.
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).