Nurse turned entrepreneur lands $1.6M grant for school
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Against the odds, Robinson won a $1.6 million federal grant, spread over three years, that will provide scholarships for lowincome students at the school and training for workers and caregivers of elderly people.
Her for-profit, storefront school — The Healthcare Institute LLC — this month joined a list of 44 names including Yale, Duke and Johns Hopkins universities that won Geriatric Workforce Enhancement Program awards from the Health Resources and Services Administration of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Five years ago, the 34-year-old single mother was unemployed and scraping by while she earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing through an accelerated Union University program, she said.
Robinson recalls the day she told her son and daughter that they were going to have fun camping in their car outside their home. The real reason was that her utilities had been cut off for nonpayment during the summer heat.
The profile of a typical certified nursing assistant student for her school is a woman age 17-40, earning less than $25,000 a year and looking for an entry-level health care career, Robinson said. If she talks to 120 people about the threeweek course, 110 of them can’t pay, she said.
“It gives me a chance to teach people, but also to help people who have had similar struggles that I have and who don’t know who to ask or who to turn to,” Robinson said.
At the beginning of this year, while managing a dialysis center in Whitehaven, Robinson found on Craigslist a storefront to lease at 7235 Winchester, east of Riverdale. She saved $10,000 for start-up costs and bought used, $10 tables and bookcases for $25 to furnish the school.
Robinson said she scoured the government website Grants.gov for funding opportunities. She hit pay dirt with the keyword “geriatric.” As workers who help nurses deliver personal care for patients in hospitals, nursing homes, day care centers and other settings, certified nursing assistants often care for older adults.
Among those to whom Robinson reached out for grant-writing advice was one of her sister’s best friends, Candace McRae Walsh, an instructor and coordinator for the University of Memphis Department of Public and Nonprofit Administration.
“When she called me back in February asking about this grant, my first instinct was to bring her down a peg or two,” Walsh said. “She has never been a grant recipient before and she had no track record.
“I’m happy that she proved me wrong, but the reason that I think she proved me wrong was because she did as I advised her,” Walsh said.
Walsh said Robinson got great collaborating partners to work with her, ranging from a doctor and community-based organizations to churches and nursing homes. Her grant application also made good use of public data to demonstrate a need.
Robinson gives credit to a longtime friend, Erica Sharp White, as the calm researcher who provided demographics and moral support. White said she had dabbled in grant writing while earning a master’s degree and as her husband, Frayser Community Schools CEO Bobby White, applied to form the charter school.
The application scored 93 of a possible 100 points.
Robinson said her education and a previous career in sales helped prepare her. Working and raising two children, it took the Whitehaven High Class of ’98 graduate a decade to earn a University of Memphis marketing degree by 2008.
Along the way, she worked for BellSouth, Konica Minolta, FedEx and AmeriGas. A layoff from negotiating government contracts for Philadelphia-based AmeriGas led her to pursue nursing. She worked at Methodist University Hospital before managing a DaVita dialysis center, a position she left soon after the July 13 grant announcement.
Her new school has started a day class and an evening class, accepting up to 15 students in each. Tuition is $1,050, plus $250 for supplies and a state certification fee. Robinson said eight or nine scholarships a month will cover only tuition.
One student, Duwanna Bryant, 33, said she’s a clerk at a distribution center and views the class as her first step toward nursing school.
“I want to get some experience under my belt before I decide to be a registered nurse,” Bryant said.