Helen Grace: Nursing scholarships for high school students

When she matriculated at Wheaton College in 1953, Helen Grace, ('63) RN, PhD, was considering medical school. But the prevailing social climate was not especially conducive to that career track for women. Her mother had been a nurse and encouraged her to take that path. So Dr. Grace left Wheaton after one year and enrolled at West Suburban Hospital School of Nursing, Oak Park.

After three years as a practicing nurse, she saw that a bachelor's degree in nursing would offer opportunities to branch out beyond a hospital setting and enrolled in the nursing program at Loyola University Chicago. Graduating in 1963, Dr. Grace spent two years teaching physical patient care to psychiatric nursing aides for the Mental Health Department of Illinois, then entered the newly developed master's program in psychiatric nursing at the University of Illinois' Medical Center. She entered the doctoral program at Northwestern University, Evanston, where she completed a PhD in sociology in 1969.

Dr. Grace is a remarkable woman with a major gift for navigating bureaucratic systems, according to Mary K. Walker, (BSN '72), PhD, dean, Loyola University Chicago Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing (Niehoff). "The doctoral program in nursing that Dr. Grace started while dean at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) was absolutely seminal--she has had a profound impact on nursing as a discipline," says Dr. Walker.

In the health sciences field, then dominated by the biological and biomedical sciences, it was an uphill battle to carve out a PhD in nursing. Dr. Grace helped legitimize nursing as a discipline with its own body of knowledge, distinct from medicine and pharmacology.

After finishing five years as dean of UIC's College of Nursing, Dr. Grace intended to continue teaching and directing graduate students. But a new door opened when the W. K. Kellogg Foundation in Battle Creek, Michigan., offered her a job. She remained at Kellogg until her retirement in 1996, serving in a variety of roles, including program director for health and vice president of programs.

Although she observes wryly that her "real role these days is as a grandmother, transporting my grandson to school and all over the place," Dr. Grace remains committed to higher education. However, her role has shifted from institutional grant-maker to private donor. Leveraging her gift with a 2:1 matching grant from the Kellogg Foundation, she established an endowment fund for Niehoff to help recruit underrepresented high school students and support them with scholarship funds. She also has established a scholarship/program support fund at UIC and one, primarily aimed at Native American students, in her home state of South Dakota.

"Most fields have aggressively tried to diversify, but nursing still remains predominately white and female," Dr. Grace notes. "I've decided that whatever money I have to contribute will be directed to the diversity issue, because it's critical for the profession to begin to resemble society."