If you ask Janice Hawkins when she first got involved with the SDGs, she’ll tell you she’s been supporting them all her life — even before universal ambitions like eradicating poverty, solving hunger, and safeguarding public health were codified into a global framework and adopted at the UN. She was the kind of child who volunteered to pick up trash in her neighborhood. A natural-born helper, Janice found her calling as a nurse.

“Most people go into nursing because they want to serve. They want people to be healthy. That’s the backbone of nursing,” she says. And, in many ways, good health is the backbone of the SDGs — and nurses underpin the field. “We are the largest healthcare workforce,” she says. “We are the frontline. We see social problems firsthand.”

As a nurse for the U.S. Army, Janice knows from experience that healthcare should be a basic human right. “I witnessed things that were outside of what I knew growing up and helped me to understand the inequities that were everywhere, specifically the need for vaccines.” 

Her deployments revealed why nurses — and their work delivering immunizations — are key for unlocking progress across the 2030 Agenda. “Ironically, nurses don’t even necessarily realize we’re advancing the SDGs. We’re just doing the work in front of us,” Janice says. “And because all the SDGs intersect with health and well-being, when we’re promoting one, we’re promoting the other.” 

Today, Janice is passing on her hard-earned knowledge as Chair of Old Dominion University’s Advanced Practice Nursing program. Her work is especially important given the need for more people in her profession. By 2030, the planet is projected to face a global shortage of 4.5 million nurses, according to the UN’s World Health Organization. 

Janice also encourages her students to take up advocacy. As a longtime champion for Shot@Life, a grassroots campaign of the United Nations Foundation that builds U.S. support for global immunization, Janice organizes workshops, phone banks, and trips to the nation’s capital so her students can meet with Members of Congress and their staff, and voice their support for UN agencies like UNICEF, which vaccinates more than half of the planet’s children.

“As nurses, we’re trained to be advocates, but we primarily do that at the bedside. We advocate for our patients, but we have rarely put them to use in the political arena,” Janice says. “Shot@Life is really who taught me to speak with legislators.”

For Janice, the SDGs offer a common ground and a unifying rallying cry for a profession that is historically underpaid, underappreciated, and underrepresented in policy-making decisions. 

After all, as she points out, their insights and impact are uniquely valuable: “How are you going to improve healthcare without nurses?”

— M.J. Altman, United Nations Foundation