Rashida Charles
Frontline COVID Nurse & Researcher
Rashida Charles is a first-generation Haitian American born in Miami, Florida and grew up in Brockton, Massachusetts. A first-generation college student, she started on a pre-med track and majored in religion and public health. She graduated from Rutgers University with her Bachelor’s degree in 2015 and joined AmeriCorps where she was trained as a health coach as part of Dr. Jeffrey Brenner’s Camden Coalition. The program, funded by a MacArthur Genius grant, was developed to reduce high-healthcare utilization patients. The opportunity gave her a first-hand experience to work on a team that addressed “housing first” for high needs patients and to coordinate social and medical care with addiction specialists, nurse practitioners, physicians, and social workers.
By seeing the work of nurses up close, she realized that applying to graduate school in nursing would be her next step. During her entry-level Master’s in Nursing Clinical Nurse Leader program at the University of Maryland, she had an opportunity to learn about nursing research and realized her career goal was to pursue research on the relationship between structural racism and health inequities concerning native and diaspora ethnic groups of African descent. Rashida currently works as a nurse in Maryland in the COVID float pool and is pursuing her nursing Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. She started the Nurse Shida YouTube channel in 2020 where she candidly shares health topics and her own journey so that others may learn from her trial and error in figuring out their nursing careers.
View Rashida’s Nurses You Should Know video here or follow her on Twitter, Instagram, or Clubhouse.
Sources
We sourced the above information from LinkedIn and directly from Rashida Charles.
Learn More
To learn more about inclusion in nursing and be part of the national discussion to address racism in nursing, check out and share the following resources:
Know Your History
- Nursing CLIO to engage with historians and scholars committed to deep work around historical accuracy in healthcare and nursing.
- American Association for the History of Nursing to attend monthly webinars on topics of nursing history, view the calendar here.
Examine Bias
- NurseManifest to attend live zoom sessions with fellow nurses on nursing’s overdue reckoning on racism or to sign their pledge.
- Breaking Bias in Healthcare, an online course created by scientist Anu Gupta, to learn how bias is related to our brain’s neurobiology and can be mitigated with mindfulness.
Support & Advocate
- National Coalition for Ethnic Minority Nurse Association to stay engaged with topics relevant to nurses of color.
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