Dear Friends,

With the COVID-19 pandemic impacting everyday life, we thank you for your continued support and wish you and our community health and peace. Right now, The Philippine Nurses Association of Virginia, Inc. (PNAVA) faces new challenges. As we adapt to these unprecedented circumstances, we’ll continue to serve our communities as best we can. However, in order to ensure the safety of our community and ourselves, we’ve made necessary modifications to our programming that we’d like to share with you.

As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit agency, we are devoted to continuing education, community service, student scholarship programs, networking, promoting the nursing profession and helping further PNAVA’s overall mission to advance the health in Filipino American communities and to lead, promote and advocate the educational, professional, and leadership opportunities for Filipino American nurses.

I am excited for the opportunities in front of us. We are expanding our capabilities with new projects that focus on building new scholarship programs to bring more nurses in the world.  We are connecting with new partnerships on research grants that focus on Filipino health. We are continuing to recruit new team members while focusing on retention. We are creating a marketing structure to generate financial support to provide the services we envision for our communities. We aim to increase visibility of Filipino nurses contributions on advocacy, policy development, and legislation.

We believe there is light at the end of the tunnel with the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine. As COVID-19 continues to spread, the future has never felt so unpredictable. While there’s a lot of uncertainty, we know that we need to adapt fast to our changing reality. Now, more than ever, our community needs us. And we need you.

By reaching out to your friends and family, sharing content on social media, forwarding a newsletter, posting a flyer, writing a blog post or speaking at a virtual meeting. The goal is to engage those near you, in small ways, which add up to big ways, reaching neighbors and peer groups to classrooms, faith communities and businesses next door.

Best regards,

Catherine Paler, RN MSN PCCN

26^th President PNA Virginia 2020-2022  “Connect Create Collaborate!”