Community Initiatives

Columbia Nursing collaborates with The GCD Program, an after-school program for 10th through 12th graders. The program provides preparation, mentoring, workforce training experiences, and health career guidance. The program prepares its participants to take licensure exams for certification as nursing assistants, EKG technicians, medical code billers, phlebotomists, and patient care technicians.

Sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, this CUIMC initiative is a free, six-week academic enrichment program for rising sophomore and junior college students who are underrepresented in the health professions. The program provides a deeper understanding of basic sciences and quantitative topics and supports the development of study skills and group learning techniques. It also offers clinical shadowing experiences, admissions and financial aid planning workshops, health policy seminars, and opportunities for students to explore nursing, medicine, dentistry, physical therapy, occupational therapy, public health, and nutrition.

The annual Super Saturday STEM Expo is a free, family event, featuring 100+ hands-on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) exhibits in the 50,000-square-foot Harlem Armory. Columbia Nursing prepares an interactive table on a health topic (such as healthy heart, infection prevention, human anatomy, etc.) for public school students in grades pre-K through 12. This is a partnership with Manhattan’s Community School District 5, Harlem Children’s Zone, and other educational and non-profit organizations.

Columbia Nursing participates in the Harlem Multi-Cultural Festivals twice a year, providing blood pressure and diabetes screenings and/or opioid information and nutrition sessions.

Columbia Nursing is in collaboration with ReImagine. Reimagine seeks collaborators who will provide spaces for justice, equity, and inclusion discussions and actions.  Reimagine also holds an annual End of Life festival, a week-long, borough-wide festival of events that aims to amplify issues related to death and dying. Event sponsors encompass arts/entertainment, healthcare/social services, spirituality, religion, and innovation/design. The goal of the festival is to highlight progressive, family-centered, environmentally innovative, and spiritually rich ways of approaching all aspects of death and dying and living.