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Life's most persistent and urgent question is, What are you doing for others?
—Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Feleta L. Wilson, PhD, RN, has more than 36 years of experience in public health and nursing. If you ask what served as her greatest source of inspiration, Feleta immediately praises her supportive mother and the neighborhood public health nurses who diligently administered shots to all the local kids when she was young. Struck by their compassion and professional poise (or was it their bright blue uniforms?), Feleta was intent on, and later successful in, following suit.

  Feleta’s educational journey began at the School of Nursing at the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (Greensboro, SC). She immediately was drawn to the nurses on campus, igniting an interest in disease prevention and health promotion and inspiring her to pursue a master’s degree in Public Health, with a concentration in nursing, at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI). She initially practiced throughout Detroit’s urban communities in efforts to expand her clinical skills and address the vast inequities based on geography, economics, race, and availability of services among underprivileged communities.

  After completing her degree, Feleta worked for state health departments as a Public Health Nursing Consultant in a nursing-based program, Early Prevention, Screening, Diagnosis, and Treatment (EPSDT). While doing consulting, Feleta felt compelled to continue her education; she enrolled in Wayne State University’s (Detroit, Michigan) doctoral program and later obtained the DPhil with an emphasis in education.

  Today, Feleta is both nurse and educator. Her duties as an academician include (but are not limited to) teaching, research, managing a graduate public health nursing program, and directing the distance learning graduate program. Her essential responsibilities as an educator include recruiting, advising, encouraging, and counseling students at both the undergraduate and graduate level.

  Community service remains one of Feleta’s most satisfying pursuits. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Detroit Community Health Center, which provides care to more than 15,000 medically underserved, uninsured, and underinsured individuals in the community. “I develop partnerships with community-based healthcare agencies, schools, church-centered organizations, and local businesses,” she says. “What is most important to me is how the decisions I make—whether they involve a nursing program or the curriculum—affect the community as a whole.”

  Feleta has found particular fulfillment in three aspects of her career. The first pertains to her passion for patient health literacy. Recent studies show that 44 million US adults are functionally illiterate and 55 million are considered marginally illiterate, adding an estimated $32 to $58 billion in healthcare costs. Poor literacy and poor health literacy result in negative health outcomes. Feleta was struck by the fact that a disproportionate amount of minorities from low-income, poorly educated backgrounds are illiterate. She explored ways to address the unmet needs of low-literacy patients who struggled with everything from failing to comprehend printed health information to the inability to effectively care for themselves. She attended intensive trainings and workshops by Dr. Jane Roots, a pioneer in health literacy, and eventually developed and disseminated culturally appropriate, easy-to-read educational materials.