2020 FNA Book Of Reports

2020 Florida Nurses Association
FNA Staff Report
Willa Fuller
Executive Director
We began the year with an orientation by international association consultant Bob Harris, who educated board
members on their roles and their fiduciary responsibility as board members.
As staff, we are guided by the Board of Directors and the Membership by way of the actions of the Membership
Assembly.
This year, our president Dr. George Byron Peraza-Smith chose to approach
the work of the board through a process called Appreciative Inquiry. With
this method the work is focused on our strengths, rather than problems
or weaknesses. We enlisted FNA Member, Dr. Roberta Christopher who is
certified in this process. She took us through exercises that helped us to
identify strengths and then to plan activities and initiatives based on those
strengths. Office staff joined the board for this exercise in order to create
synchronicity and an understanding of the goals and intended outcomes.
Additionally, we conducted a Leadership Strengths test from the Gallup Organization and each board member
participated to identify the strengths of each board members. It was a fun and interesting process grounded
in the serious work of association leadership.
We also looked at the strategic plan and prior years strategic plan, and selected to return to the previous
model of our plan at the advice of our consultant. We are also using the prior plan as a guide for the work of
the staff and continue to work on meeting those more specific goals.
Below the work on each goal is outlined.
Nurse Advocacy
Serve as the voice of nursing
While we always represent nursing in various ways throughout the year, this year COVID-19 presented many
opportunities to speak to the media regarding the response to COVID -19. Additionally, board member Darlene
Dempsey, led an aggressive education effort by enlisting other nursing voices from various organizations
to partner with her to present educational content on COVID-19 through weekly and bi-weekly webinars. We
presented over 20 webinars on COVID-19 and related topics, including clinical aspects, epidemiology, health
disparities, ethics and self-care. Many members, including board members participated in these webinars.
We also conducted a Town Hall as well as a survey, to gather Florida specific information on COVID-19 and the
nursing workforce to be able to respond to media requests with current and accurate information.
To date we have participated in over 16 print of television interviews on COVID-19.
We used social media to voice the concerns for nurses and to promote
compliance with safety guidelines for mitigating the pandemic locally.
Information from the CDC and other sources were posted on Facebook,
Twitter, Linked-In and Instagram. We continue to develop our social media
presence and to seek member engagement to increase our presence on
social media.
We continue our legislative advocacy work and this year we engaged the
lobbying firm to focus on grassroots advocacy and amplifying our voice by
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