Why Zorya Foundation’s Health Equity Mission Means So Much to Me, Personally and Professionally

By Emma Nelson, as told to Marisa Torrieri Bloom

I found out my Uncle John was HIV positive when I was 10 or 11. I was old enough to understand that he was sick, but too young to grasp what having HIV really meant.

In the 1990s, few people talked openly about HIV or AIDS, or the negative stigmas, medical hurdles, and constant stress that HIV positive folks face. I also grew up in Iowa, which wasn’t the most diverse or progressive place in the world. And while I was fortunate to have been raised by two loving parents, four siblings, a home and financial security in the small town of Clinton, I was pretty sheltered — and couldn’t comprehend the emotional significance of my uncle’s HIV journey until I was much older.

Uncle John was a quiet but strong fighter, and I wish I’d told him, out loud, that he was the reason I started my career as a social worker specializing in the care of HIV-positive individuals.

I’ll always regret that I didn’t tell him, even as I stood by his side on the night he passed away, right around Christmas.

Today, I’m doing my best to carry on his legacy in my new role as director of operations and advocacy at Zorya Foundation, which was founded with the mission of connecting women and gender minorities in healthcare to the resources, tools, and financial opportunities they need to take care of themselves.

It isn’t easy work, but it’s critical work. Nearly 80% of workers in the healthcare industry are women — but most well-paying executive positions are not held by them. Meanwhile, burnout is escalating. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report, 1.7 million people have quit their healthcare jobs in 2022 alone.

As a woman who worked on the front lines of healthcare throughout the pandemic, I can relate. I can also say with certainty that if we don’t do more to support these women, we’ll be facing a true healthcare crisis in the coming years. 

Working on the Front Lines of Healthcare

Like the physicians, nurses, social workers, or clinical assistants I’d met at the Wisconsin hospital where I worked for nine years, I entered the healthcare profession because I wanted to help people. And like many healthcare professionals, my own burgeoning feelings of workplace burnout built up slowly.  

Prior to Covid, I spent more than a decade working with people living with HIV and AIDS. I began my career at the AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin, providing culturally sensitive, trauma-informed care to patients living with HIV. In my next job at the Infectious Disease Clinic at the Froedtert Hospital & the Medical College of Wisconsin, I helped develop practice standards and protocols for the “Linkage to Care” initiative, a HRSA Special Project of National Significance.

My job was to engage patients who fall through the gaps — or those who, upon receiving a positive HIV diagnosis, struggled to engage in care. Destigmatizing and educating the public is probably the biggest and most unique hurdle to working in the HIV community, even for folks who seem to be coping with their diagnosis fairly well. Because HIV is associated with risky behavior, there’s a moral clout that we put on this diagnosis that is different than pretty much any other medical diagnosis you can get. 

Often times patients were wary of me. Being a cis gender white woman is a challenge of privilege, which compounds the challenge of a power differential between healthcare providers and their patients. I tried to go above and beyond to make patients feel as comfortable as possible to try to dispel some of that power imbalance. Nevertheless, I treasured small successes, such as helping folks navigate healthcare systems to engage in care and achieve viral suppression, addressing challenging psychosocial barriers that impacted their care, and helping pregnant mothers with HIV engage in care obtain the care and deliver healthy, HIV-negative children.

But by early 2021, I started personally feeling the negative effects of a cultural shift, a political and social divisiveness that negatively impacted healthcare providers. While, in the early days of Covid, everyone lauded the healthcare professionals who were on the front lines with nice viral videos and big, supportive gestures, as things started to improve in their immediate lives with vaccines, many forgot that the fight isn’t over. We’ve forgotten that not too long ago, healthcare was busting at the seams.

While I wasn’t directly caring for Covid patients, I worked with those who did.  I worked inside the hospital and put myself at risk every single day — so I saw, firsthand, that most of the people who worked on the front lines taking the most risks were women who weren’t paid very well, including nurses, nursing assistants, and medical aids. At the beginning of the pandemic, many of these individuals had to separate themselves from their young children so they could care for their patients.

This level of risk and professionalism without adequate support is unsustainable. We need doctors, nurses, and social workers, and they’re leaving the medical profession in droves.

Filling the Gaps

I made the transition from frontline work as an HIV professional to Zorya Foundation because it was the best way I could leverage my experience — and impact healthcare workers’ lives in a positive way.

There is a camaraderie among folks who do frontline work. I would not have lasted as long in my previous jobs had I not had phenomenal colleagues, coworkers, and leadership to rely on for support and encouragement — especially on the hardest days, when we’d lose patients, support patients in crisis, or see patients fall through the many cracks in our healthcare and social safety nets.

This is why Zorya's mission resonates so much with me. I want to support and advocate for the healthcare community by focusing on several key goals, such as:  

1. Improving retention of the healthcare workforce, by providing financial support to frontline healthcare workers.

2. Reducing clinical burnout, by directly addressing the financial and emotional stressors that lead to healthcare workers quitting their jobs.

3. Bolstering community support, by creating a community of support for women in healthcare to share experiences, seek support from other professionals, network, and share resources.  

4. Boosting opportunities for professional development, by supporting women in healthcare who wish to pursue continuing education, professional development, and leadership opportunities that will allow them to “climb the ladder.” 

As I’ve learned over the course of my career, the old adage “It is both a blessing and a curse to feel everything so very deeply” holds true for me and so many of my peers. And while healthcare career burnout won’t go away completely anytime soon, at Zorya we’re doing our best to demonstrate to women and gender minorities that we appreciate them — and are so grateful for the work they are doing to keep the rest of us safe and healthy.

Emma Nelson is the Director of Operations & Advocacy at the Zorya Foundation