WCN is kicking off a new interview series: Change Makers in Washington Nursing. To start our new series, we interviewed Denise Mills, MN, RN, Clinical Manager for Perianesthesia at St. Joseph Medical Center in Tacoma and current President of the Ebony Nurses Association of Tacoma. To learn more about the Ebony Nurses Association of Tacoma and their available scholarships, visit Ebonynursesoftacoma.org.
WCN ran into Denise when she volunteered to support WCN’s Teen Nursing Academy at Muckleshoot Tribal School in April. Mills’ journey into nursing was far from a straight line, but she overcame every obstacle to accomplish her goal and become a nurse. Now, she is a passionate advocate for the education, advancement, and leadership of BIPOC nurses throughout Pierce County. As a change maker in Washington Nursing, here is what she had to share with WCN about her experience.
WCN: Can you share with us a little about yourself?
Mills: I am originally from Tacoma and went to school on the Hilltop. My parents came to Tacoma in 1964. My dad was drafted into the military and stationed in Tacoma; he brought my mom here from Louisiana a little later. My brother and I came along a few years after that.
Their first home was right at the edge of Hilltop, but by the time I was born, they had moved to south Tacoma. However, we were still very much a part of the Hilltop community. My parents were Baptist and attended Mt. Tabor Baptist Church. Growing up, however, my brother and I attended Allen AME church since AME had a church van. My brother and I were both baptized at Allen AME. I was married there as well.
I graduated from Foss High School. Back then, the world was a different place. In the 90s, black education at HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) was a big thing, and several of us from church decided we would attend an HBCU. I attended Grambling State University, my friend Kevin went to Morehouse, and my other friend Tiffany went to Clark Atlanta. And with that, we left Tacoma.
WCN: Can you tell us about your nursing journey so far?
Mills: I started as a premed student. I love science. I wanted to be a doctor or a teacher. Back then, my parents and I did not know much about schools, and though I was on a premed track, Grambling did not have an accredited premed program. My first roommate was a nursing major and encouraged me to study nursing. I also had a cousin who wanted to be a nurse. I was not interested in being a nurse at the time. But, as I went through school, I wasn’t happy with premed and decided late in my junior year to change to nursing.
From there, my nursing journey gets a bit convoluted.
Grambling had the best nursing scores in Louisiana at the time. But I’m down south in the Bible Belt. I knew about the racism there. My parents were from Louisiana, and we visited there my whole life. What I did not know until I got to Grambling was the nursing school faculty was almost 100% white. There were three black professors, and that was it. I interviewed with Dean Smith, everything went well, and I was accepted into the nursing program. It wasn’t until I was in the nursing program that I saw where the gaps were.
In northern Louisiana, you had Grambling, an HBCU, and the University of Louisiana Monroe and Louisiana Tech, two predominantly white colleges, all within 30 minutes of Ruston. There are minority scholarships, and there are also diversity minority scholarships, and if you were a white student going to an HBCU, you could receive diversity minority funding. My class was about sixty percent White and forty percent Black. There was a lot of overt racism. For example, you could not wear braids in your hair, or you would get marked down by the Dean. Also, you could not be pregnant in nursing school. I wasn’t, but I had some classmates who were married and had to sit out of the program when they got pregnant.
It was a five-semester program with levels 1 through 4. Soon, it became apparent that my graduating was not on their priority list. I failed level one. And that’s okay. Nursing school is hard. I retook it and did well. For level two, I did fine. When I got to level three, we started to get new instructors coming in. We had a White professor come in who called out the program. In class one day, she said, “I don’t like what is going on here. I’m probably going to lose my job for this, but they are having secret meetings with the White students and giving them the answers to the tests.”
We all looked at each other because we knew something was happening. But we didn’t know what.
We went into the 4th quarter, which was OB. We had been doing med-serge most of the time. My instructor in this class put me in a room with a pregnant woman and said to start her IV and do an assessment. I had never done an IV, and I didn’t know what assessment I was doing. I had done assessments on med-surge patients, but never one on a person with a baby in their belly. And the whole quarter, she did that with most of us. She would tell us we were not prepared and that she did not understand what we had been doing the last three years. We tried advocating for ourselves. We told her that we had never done OB before.
Later that quarter, my dad passed away, and I ended up failing out that quarter, too. I was so embarrassed. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I should have had my act together. I didn’t want to tell my mom. She was planning on coming down in May for my graduation. When I went home for Christmas, I had to tell her. At the time, there were seven of us who were close and did not make it out of that nursing program.
I was also a missionary with the Southern Baptist Church during this time, and that summer, I went on a mission trip with them to Sydney, Australia. That was in 2000. I was supposed to go from June through August. While there, I applied to multiple nursing programs across the U.S. but did not get in. Then I learned that the full mission trip was for six months, but for students, it was only three months. Since I had not been accepted into a nursing program, they asked me to stay for the rest of the mission. I had raised funds for the first three months, but now I had to raise funds for the last three months.
By August, most of the students had left, and the ten of us who stayed were sitting in a boardroom with our lead pastor, talking about the next phase of the mission. Then, the pastor looked at me and said, “Tetelestai. Do you know what ‘tetelestai’ means?” I told him I didn’t know what it meant. He said, “It means it is finished. It is what Jesus said on the cross.” I said, “Okay. What is finished?” He said, “I recently received a check from Singapore for the exact amount of money you need to stay here.” He told me it was given anonymously, and it was in my name. Right then, I knew I was meant to be there. And since I had raised close to $800 already, I looked around the room and saw Nick, a young man still working on raising his funds. I told Nick he could have the $800 I had raised. If someone blessed me in such a way, then the money I had raised should go to someone else. So, I gave Nick the money and stayed in Australia for the last three months of the mission.
I had the time of my life and still have great family connections from that experience.
While in Australia, there was a cricket field I would walk around in the mornings to think and pray. There had been a man I was seeing back home, but I didn’t want it to get too serious because I didn’t want to lose my focus. One morning, as I walked around that cricket field, I heard intuitively a voice I believe was Christ speaking to me. I heard, “Fred is not the one, so don’t worry about it. Your husband is going to be a foreigner. And you will graduate, but you must go home.” At the time, I didn’t want to go home because I was embarrassed for failing out of school. But the three things I heard on the cricket field that morning changed my mind, and on October 31, 2000, I left Australia. I stayed in Louisiana for a while before coming home to Tacoma in February 2001.
Back in Tacoma, I registered for a general studies BA at UW Tacoma. In October of 2001, I sat in my first class. In that class, I met a man named Angelo Mills from Trinidad and Tobago. I didn’t want to date anyone at the time. Graduating was my focus. But, six months before graduating with my BA in August of 2002, Angelo and I did start dating. And on October 1, 2005, we got married. The three things I had heard that morning on the cricket field in Australia had all come to fruition.
After that, I started working at St. Clare Hospital in Lakewood and eventually went to school for my LPN degree. I took Grambling off my transcript and decided to start from the ground up. I retook all my prerequisites, including all seven of my science classes. I graduated from LPN school, and Angelo and I moved to a house.
Next, I applied to RN school, and on May 1st, I found out I was accepted. On May 30th, I found out I was pregnant. Thankfully, it was a part-time program. While in the program, however, I hid my pregnancy, remembering what I heard at Grambling, that you can’t be pregnant in nursing school. One day, when I was about eight months along, the Dean came to me and said, “Congratulations are in order, right?” I looked at her while wearing these big scrubs and said, “What are you talking about?” And she said, “I’m talking about the baby in your belly.” I said, “Please don’t make me drop out of school.” She said, “Why would you think that?” I shared with her that I was told you couldn’t be pregnant in nursing school. She replied, “That is not so. It is a natural part of life.” She then shared with me how one of the students had to have a C-section and missed clinicals and how they were going to make sure that student still graduated, just like they were going to make sure I would still graduate.
I gave birth halfway through the program. Knowing I was supported really helped. When I graduated, my son was nine months old and sitting on my hip.
I think that is why my passion for nursing education is so strong. It is because, though I had the bandwidth, the strength, and the resources to redo all of that, it was very unnecessary. There are a lot of people that can’t do that. They couldn’t pay for school again. They couldn’t have overcome all the obstacles I had to overcome. And that is why I want to make nursing education open and free to everyone. We often look at it under the umbrella of marginalized communities, but it is not really about that. It is about everyone having equity and access to a quality education.
And going back to Grambling’s BSN program, they did end up losing their accreditation for several years. The covert racism was hidden for a while, but in 2015, they lost their accreditation, and they didn’t get it back until several years later. When I first came home after failing out of their nursing program and told people what had happened, no one believed me. Not even from my community. But, when their BSN program lost accreditation, it was confirmation for me that what I had gone through was happening, and the state board had to come in and clean it up.
WCN: You are the current president of the Ebony Nurses Association of Tacoma; how did you get involved in this organization?
Mills: While in LPN school, I learned about the organization through a flyer. I saw they were giving out scholarships. I applied for and received one to help me finish school. When I started working at the VA as an LPN, one of the members was working there, and she encouraged me to join. Back then, I was only a member for two or three years. I was young and still raising my family. I rejoined the organization again in 2020.
WCN: What is the mission of the Ebony Nurses Association?
Mills: The primary mission of the Ebony Nurses Association of Tacoma is to provide financial assistance and scholarships to students of African American Heritage who pursue studies leading to careers in professional nursing. We also want to influence change in the existing conditions of the Black community related to healthcare. We want to provide recruitment for Black nurses to leadership positions in Tacoma Hospitals and other healthcare areas. We want to promote and support members’ professional development. And we want to create pathways into nursing for African Americans.
We focus on our Black and Brown, BIPOC, and marginalized communities. But honestly, it benefits everyone because we all need to know how to work with each other. We all have different skills and things to learn from each other.
WCN: What kind of impact has the community support had on you?
Mills: I share my testimony more often now because I see value in it. But the other members of the Ebony Nurses Association were the first ones to believe me. Also, being in a room with people who look like you and understand your lived experience is important. Because, in the nursing world, there are not a lot of us out here. And, too often, we don’t get that everyday camaraderie at work. Spending time with other members feels like home. Some people are from the South, some from the North. One of our members is from New Orleans, and since my parents are from New Orleans, I can relate to her. I also feel valued. We are all on the same playing field. We all have something to contribute and something to share.
WCN: Why do you think the work of the Association is important to advancing health equity?
Mills: The Ebony Nurses Association of Tacoma is important because healthcare is not equitable. Not yet. We live in a time when people are making decisions based on personal preferences and bringing up old mantras that no longer exist. Ebony Nurses Association needs to be here because, in the Pacific Northwest, there are still a lot of Black and Brown children who don’t think they could ever be in the position I’m in. They still go to doctor’s offices and hospitals and see far too few healthcare providers that look like them. We must ensure that hospitals, clinics, and all healthcare environments reflect the communities they serve.
WCN: What are some challenges or goals you have for the organization?
Mills: Our biggest goal is to grow the organization. Ebony Nurses are mighty and strong, and we have a wealth of knowledge, but there are only a few of us. We have lost traction, and people don’t know we are still here. That is why I’m talking to WCN. My biggest goals right now are growing the membership and our funding.
As an organization, we also want to host an annual healthcare event that connects the entire community. We have to be in the community and engaged. People want to be a part of an organization that is doing something. The Ebony Nurses Association isn’t doing much right now because we have limited membership. Some of our members are in school, and, at this point, everyone in our organization is in advanced practice nursing or nursing leadership.
Another goal is to collaborate more with other nursing organizations like the Chinese Nurses Organization, the Filipino Nurses Association, and the Washington Chapter of the National Hispanic Nurses Association because we all have something to learn from each other, and in numbers, we can do much work.
WCN: Is there anything else you would like to share?
Mills: There is still hope for all of us to become a community where we see each other as human beings. And as long as we have people in this world to do this work, everything will be alright. I think I lost some hope in 2020 and up until recently. But being part of the Ebony Nurses Association and Virginia Mason Franciscan Health and seeing where they used to be silent and how they are now climbing out of that silence and taking a stand is bringing back my hope. There are a lot of good people out there. I think the cancel culture has scared a lot of us, but people are starting to fight back against that. So, my biggest thing is that there is still hope, and the more we all believe in that hope, the more it will grow.
