Outgoing JHNAA President Fernando Mena-Carrasco, center, with 2025 Dean’s Alumni Award winners Chelsea Samms, left, and Natalia Barolin, both from the Class of 2015.
MY FELLOW ALUMNI,
Serving as president of the Johns Hopkins Nurses’ Alumni Association has been one of the great honors of my professional life. Having the opportunity to represent a community of nurses rooted in compassion, critical inquiry, and humanism fills me with pride and gratitude.
As our Nursing Pledge states, we respect wellness as a human right, and promote this with individuals, their families, and communities. This means that we practice with respect for the worth of every person, even when our worldviews and life experiences do not align with theirs. And we hold fast to our shared responsibility to promote the health of other fellow human beings—especially those whose burden of injustice is much too high. Embodying these nursing genotypes through research, clinical practice, advocacy, and policy leadership, Hopkins nurses are leading efforts to transform systems that perpetuate suffering into those that sustain equity and healing.
Sustaining this culture of competent compassion also means we have to build community and support one another—celebrating and cherishing the brave and foundational work carried out by our forebearers and mentoring those who come after us so that they can grow and carry on with this noble and important way of life. This past year, our Alumni Association has strengthened connections across generations and geographies. We have convened virtually and in-person, reimagining what it means to be part of a network that transcends our Baltimore campus. We have broken bread together, welcomed hundreds of new graduates and students, and shown up for our students with concrete financial support—because we remember what it meant when someone did the same for us.
But our duty as nurses extends far beyond professional connection—it calls for moral courage and discernment. Every person deserves to feel safe, valued, and cared for—whether in a hospital, a classroom, a place of worship, or any space they enter. Nurses have a responsibility to protect the well-being of individuals and communities, offering comfort in times of fear and standing with those who are vulnerable. When access to essential health care services is at risk, nurses speak up for the care people need to live healthy, meaningful lives. When individuals, including members of the transgender community, face barriers to care or acceptance, nurses affirm their dignity and work to ensure everyone receives respectful, compassionate care. And when members of our communities face the threat of being separated from their families, schools, or workplaces through arrest or deportation, nurses uphold the values of safety, belonging, and humanity— creating spaces where people can heal, learn, and live without fear.
So, wherever you are licensed to practice—at the bedside, in boardrooms, in research labs, classrooms, the halls of Congress, domestically or abroad—I call on you to embody what it means to be a Hopkins Nurse. Practice with compassion and respect the inherent dignity and worth of every person. Use your powerful voice to respond proportionately to the needs of the most marginalized. Carry forward our profession’s values with clarity and conviction, always centering the people we serve.
Thank you for the privilege of walking alongside you in this moment. May we continue to meet it with courage, imagination, and an unrelenting commitment to those we serve.
Fernando Mena-Carrasco, MSN, MSW, RN
President, Johns Hopkins Nurses’ Alumni Association
2023-2025
Fernando Mena-Carrasco, MSN, MSW, RN
President, Johns Hopkins Nurses’ Alumni Association
Doctoral Fellow, American Nurses Association (ANA) & Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)