A Legacy Built by Believers
In the 1920s, a nurse in Virginia who wanted advanced training had to leave. Opportunities for graduate nursing education in the South were so limited that many nurses traveled north to study, and many never came home.
Agnes Randolph and the Graduate Nurses Association of Virginia decided to change that. In 1928, they began one of the first major fundraising campaigns in the School of Nursing’s history. It took three years of persistence. The result was a $50,000 gift that would eventually endow a chair of nursing in honor of Virginia nursing leader Sadie Heath Cabaniss. It was the first known endowed nursing chair in the country.
The School of Nursing marks 125 years in 2026. Its story, from a hospital-based program founded in 1901 to one of the nation’s leading nursing schools, is a story of people who looked at what nursing could become and chose to invest in it.
The First Chair, and the Model It Created
With the $50,000 raised, the Sadie Heath Cabaniss Memorial School of Nursing Education began at the University of Virginia, in the Department of Education. Louise Oates, MA, RN, was appointed the program’s first professor of nursing and director. She also became the first holder of the Sadie Heath Cabaniss Professorship, the chair that three years of determination had made possible.
The nurses who established the chair designed it to outlast those who held it. The nurses who built it designed it to outlast them. The university invests the gift and uses the investment income to support the position year after year. When one professor retires, the endowment is ready for the next, a permanent source of funding that helps the university attract and keep accomplished faculty.
That is why the early gift mattered far beyond a single professorship. It showed how philanthropy could strengthen the school for generations to come. Jeanne Alhusen, PhD, CRNP, RN, FAAN, the Pew Charitable Trusts Interim Dean of UVA School of Nursing, and the UVA Medical Center Professor of Nursing, sees that legacy in action every day.
“Endowed faculty positions are an investment in excellence that extends across generations,” Alhusen said. “They help us attract and support exceptional faculty whose impact reaches our students, our profession, and the communities we serve.”
The Student Who Knew Her Path
Students have always been at the heart of the School of Nursing, and philanthropy has long played a role in helping them pursue their education. During World War II, as the need for nurses and other health professionals grew dramatically, federal scholarship support expanded. In the decades since, the landscape of nursing education and financial aid has changed considerably. Today, thanks in large part to generous donors, UVA nursing students have more opportunities for financial support than ever before. Combined with UVA’s commitment to financial aid, alumni giving is why 65% of undergraduate nursing students and 68% of graduate nursing students receive a scholarship.
For Haile “Moe” Mokrzycki, (CNL ’27), that support was decisive. The Conway Scholars, part of a partnership that began in 2013 when Bill and Joanne Conway invested in nursing education through the Bedford Falls Foundation, covered a substantial amount of her tuition across the entire Clinical Nurse Leaders (CNL) program.
“Having that certainty made it to where I knew that the CNL program was the way to go,” Mokrzycki said. “I was able to meet Mr. Conway last year and I heard how the nurses who cared for his [late] wife made such an impact. It solidified my ‘why’ for the CNL program even more: I’m in the right spot, and I want to be the kind of nurse that makes that kind of impact one day.”
That certainty has real consequences. A scholarship gives students the freedom to focus on learning, clinical training, research, and service. They graduate with less debt and can choose where and how to practice without first calculating a loan payment.
“The greatest impact of philanthropy is that it creates opportunities—opportunities to support the next generation of nurse scientists, advance research that addresses health disparities, and translate new knowledge into better health for individuals, families, and communities,” Alhusen said. “That is a legacy that extends well beyond any single grant or career.”
Where Students Learn to Work as a Team
Generosity has also shaped the spaces where students train. In 2006, a major gift from the Theresa A. Thomas Foundation and the Goodwin family, along with a matching grant from the Mary Morton Parsons Foundation, expanded and renovated the Clinical Simulation Learning Center. Further investment from the Conways and the Parsons family led to today’s Mary Morton Parsons Clinical Simulation Learning Center, which is a 13,100-square-foot facility endorsed by the International Nursing Association for Clinical Simulation.
“Those donors did more than fund a facility,” said Ryne Ackard, MS, CHSE, CHSOS, director of the University of Virginia Simulation Collaborative. “They helped shape a culture of collaboration that continues to influence how we teach and how our graduates care for patients.”
The lab is part of a partnership between the Schools of Nursing and Medicine, giving nursing students hands-on experience alongside future colleagues.
Keeping Nursing’s Story Alive
The same spirit is at work in a newer effort. Barbara Brodie, PhD, RN, FAAN, joined by a dedicated group of alumni and faculty emeriti, envisioned the Barbara M. Brodie Professorship in Nursing History. Once fully endowed, it will support the faculty position at the Eleanor Crowder Bjoring History Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry.
Brodie founded the center in 1991. It is one of only three major centers for nursing history in the United States and one of only two that are fully endowed. Her successors, Arlene Keeling and Barbra Mann Wall, built a loyal base of supporters whose philanthropy secured its future.
For Dominique Tobbell, PhD, Centennial Distinguished Professor of Nursing and the center’s current director, that foundation made the work possible. “When I took over as director, I could focus on expanding the center’s research, educational programming, and the collection and preservation of historical materials related to the history of nursing,” she said.
Understanding healthcare, Tobbell argues, requires attention to what nurses have done. “Nurses represent the largest segment of the U.S. healthcare workforce, and they spend significantly more time with patients than any other member of the healthcare team,” she said. “Nursing history offers an essential lens through which to examine major changes that have taken place in American healthcare.”
A Future Worthy of the Past
From the nurses who organized in 1928 to the alumni who gather each year to establish awards and scholarships, the School of Nursing has been shaped by people with deeply personal reasons for giving back.
“When I look at the School of Nursing today, I see the impact of generations of people who believed deeply in what nurses can do,” Alhusen said. “Their generosity has given us the foundation to think bigger, pursue bold ideas, and prepare nurses and nurse scientists for challenges we cannot yet imagine. Our responsibility now is to build on that legacy and create a future worthy of it.”