The Helene Fuld Health Trust

Over

20 YEARS OF GRATITUDE

With a mission to support the health, welfare, and education of student nurses, the Helene Fuld Health Trust is the nation’s largest private funder devoted to nursing students and nursing education.

“It has such an amazing name and reputation, and you can tell just from the website how much the school stands for community service,” she says.

The clincher in her decision to come to Emory: a fellowship that paid half of her tuition.

Allstrom was awarded a Fuld Service Learning Fellowship, a program that supports MN+MSN pathway students with a special interest in underserved communities. She’s a work-study student in the Lillian Carter Center, which houses the fellowships, and volunteers as a nurse with Community Advanced Practice Nurses, helping to staff a free walk-in clinic at an Atlanta homeless shelter.

“We select students who are interested in community engagement and social responsibility,” says Lalita Kaligotla, MSW, MBA, who oversees the Fuld Fellowships as senior director of leadership and engagement at the School of Nursing. “The whole idea is to have a broader role in providing health care to underserved populations.”

The fellowships started in 2002 with a grant from the Helene Fuld Health Trust. In Allstrom’s case, the fellowship supported her accelerated master’s degree, which she earned in 2022. She’s now pursuing her doctorate in nursing practice and expects to graduate in 2024 as a women’s health and gender-related nurse practitioner.

There are two Fuld Fellows in addition to Allstrom: Leah Bercovitch 23MN, who works on issues of food insecurity among children with Strong4Life, an initiative at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta; and Guadalupe Castaneda 23MN, who works with Latino Community Fund Georgia to provide health screening and health education to community members.

Fuld Fellows have gone on to do everything from working as nurse practitioners to leading community service organizations.

Allstrom would be happy to follow a similar path. After completing her DNP, she hopes to continue her work in free walk-in clinics. — Jim

Auchmutey

In 1935, Dr. Leonhard Felix Fuld and his sister, Florentine, created a foundation in honor of their mother, Helene Shwab Fuld, who died in 1923. During her lifetime, Helene Fuld was passionately interested in health issues, and the foundation named for her was originally dedicated to the “relief of poverty, suffering, sickness, and distress.” In 1961, Dr. Fuld limited the foundation’s focus to “the improvement of the health and welfare of student nurses.”

The School of Nursing is grateful to the Helene Fuld Health Trust for the gifts of over

$12 million to fund the Fuld Service Learning Fellowship, the Fuld Fellowship Program in Palliative Care, and additional scholarships for Master of Nursing students.

The school’s first gift from the Helene Fuld Health Trust was in 2002. Over the past 20 years, more than 100 students have benefited from tuition support provided by the trust.