Help is on the Way

by Jill Cousins

When Nancy Rudner left home for college, first to Boston University and then to the University of Connecticut, she admits her only real goal was to graduate. She was a history major with no particular career path in mind until she spent a couple of semesters abroad in Colombia during her last two years.

Nancy, who was born in New York and raised in a small town in Connecticut, says she had always been a value-driven person, but it took those trips to South America for her to realize her true passion.

“Once I was there [in Colombia] and saw the socio-political impact and how that affects health, that’s when I decided to go into healthcare,” says Nancy, who lives in Casselberry with husband Udeth Lugo.

A couple of years after graduating from college, Nancy enrolled in the accelerated nursing program at Pace University in New York to earn a master’s degree in nursing and went on to receive another master’s degree in public health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Ph.D. in public health from the University of Michigan.

As a nurse practitioner, however, Nancy knew she wanted to do more than just work with patients in a hospital. Inspired by her experiences abroad, her Jewish values, and trailblazing nurses like Lillian Wald, Nancy has blazed her own path as an advocate for social justice – working locally and traveling nationally and internationally to help those who are less fortunate and in need of healthcare and other social services. She is driven by the Jewish concept of tikkun olam – performing acts of kindness in an effort to pursue social justice and repair the world.

“I wanted to do something in healthcare, and I knew that one-on-one was never going to be enough,” Nancy says. “In a clinic, I could see 25 patients a day and never get to the root of their problems. What was clear to me was that it’s about social justice. I have seen the inequalities in our society and how they contribute to the inequalities in healthcare.”

Since moving to Central Florida in 1987, Nancy has worked in a variety of different healthcare-related jobs. She is currently an associate professor for the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Nursing, where she teaches population health, and she has worked on and off for the past 20 years with the Shepherd’s Hope free clinic in Longwood as a nurse practitioner, providing primary care for uninsured patients. Nancy also works part-time as a nurse practitioner for a network of local clinics that provide primary care for seniors.

Disaster Response

After Hurricanes Irma and Maria ravaged Puerto Rico in September 2017, Nancy joined forces with a nonprofit group to make several trips there to set up pop-up clinics to provide medication, water, and other necessities to the devastated residents.

“It was the best nursing I ever did,” Nancy says. “It was so pure, so concrete. You were working with these awesome people who are like-minded, wanting to do good. Even though they weren’t Jewish, it was all following the values of tzedakah [charity] and justice. It was wonderful.”

Shortly after her work in Puerto Rico, Nancy made two trips to Arizona with the Registered Nurse Response Network, where she worked with Central American refugees who were seeking asylum in the United States.

“The work at the border with the refugees was heartwarming and heartbreaking,” Nancy says.

She remembers kids at the refugee shelters trying to steal a few moments of childhood by riding bikes in a circle and drawing with chalk on the sidewalks while their parents huddled in small groups to pray for survival.

In Puerto Rico, with neighborhoods leveled and infrastructure in shambles, Nancy and her team helped people wherever they could find them, often in the streets or inside whatever few buildings remained.

“One woman said, ‘Go to the bar. Those guys need some care!’” Nancy recalls.

Inside a bar with no power,  she took patients’ blood pressure while on bar stools and, with the island’s pharmacies either destroyed or out of medicine, distributed basic medications from a large duffel bag.

Nancy’s work today is focused on helping communities to be healthier and teaching the next generation of nurses to do the same. One of her biggest role models is Lillian Wald, a Jewish nurse and humanitarian, who founded the Henry Street Settlement in New York City’s Lower East Side after observing the poverty and hardships experienced by immigrants in 1893. The Settlement transformed the community through social, educational, and recreational programs rather than simply treating residents for medical issues.

“To me, it’s about social justice grounded in Jewish values,” Nancy says. “It’s about helping people live their best lives, and that includes navigating the system because the system is so broken. It’s not about treating everybody with the same drugs. It’s about fixing the problems in our society to prevent these problems.”