Why I Made a Legacy Gift

Home Give to UMSON Louisa Parsons Legacy SocietyWhy I Made a Legacy Gift

When Ann Cain retired from the School of Nursing in 1994 after serving for 30 years on the faculty, her colleagues and students came together to create the Ann Ottney Cain Endowed Lectureship in Psychiatric Nursing. “I was overwhelmed. It was such a meaningful expression of high regard,” Cain recalls today.

“Psychiatric nursing was the first specialty tube offered in the Master of Science program at the School, beginning in 1954,” explains Cain, who says she loved working with graduate students at the School—“serving as teacher, mentor, advisor, and role model to them and to many other professionals in the field of mental health.”

Recently, Cain made a planned gift of life insurance to support the lectureship. “I did this because psychiatric nursing is a wonderful and challenging field,” she says, “and the lecture is a way of celebrating it on a yearly basis at a school of nursing with a long history of psychiatric nursing excellence. The lecture calls attention, in a very positive way, to the many contributions psychiatric nurses have made and currently make.”

If you would like to learn more about making a planned gift, or about membership in the Louisa Parsons Legacy Society, please contact us. You can also visit the University of Maryland Baltimore Foundation for more information.

Courtney Ann Kehoe Thomas, BSN ’66, spent most of her career working as a public health nurse and nurse practitioner. She served for many years as director of child health programs for the state health department of Colorado and recently retired from her position as nurse consultant for Colorado’s Nurse-Family Partnership Program. As one of the first nurse practitioners in the nation, Thomas has been active on clinical, professional, and political fronts in spearheading changes to nursing practice and nursing statutes in Colorado and nationwide. She has been recognized at the local, state, and national level for her contributions to her profession.

Thomas says she feels fortunate to have received her education at the University of Maryland at a time when many nurses were still entering practice from non-academic schools of nursing.

“Having a baccalaureate degree allowed me to become a nurse practitioner in the very early days of this new role,” she says. “Nurses like me have blazed a trail for others and facilitated changes to nursing practice that have not only benefited nurses but all the patients who are the consumers of nursing care.”

Read more about Courtney on page 44 of the Spring/Summer 2011 edition of NURSING magazine.

Phyllis Scharp, BSN ’50, made a planned gift to support scholarships at the School of Nursing because she thinks that “people who would like to go into the field of nursing but cannot afford it should be given the opportunity to pursue their dreams.”

Throughout the long span of her nursing career, Scharp worked at University of Maryland Medical Center, St. Josephs Hospital, and in private practices, before finishing her career in 1993 at Manor Care Nursing Home in Towson, Md.

“I really feel that I benefited from my years spent at the University of Maryland, and as I get older I truly appreciate the friendships that I established there,” she says.

Graduating from the University of Maryland School of Nursing was a dream come true for Sharon Michael, BSN '71. "I always tell everybody how proud I am to be a University of Maryland graduate," she says.

After taking a professor's advice to pursue her graduate studies in a different geographic location, she headed west to the University of Colorado, where she earned a master's degree as a nurse practitioner specializing in the Medical/Surgical field. Early in her career as a home health care consultant, she taught courses in the burgeoning field, but "some of the nurses just didn't have the perspective like those from the University of Maryland," she says. During the last 12 years of her 20-year career at the Colorado State Health Department, she worked as the section chief in chronic disease prevention.

"A portion of my estate goes to the organizations that have meant so much to me over the years — one being the School of Nursing," says Michael. As a recipient of two scholarships when she was a student at the School, she wanted to give current students the same opportunity she had by creating an endowment to benefit BSN students. "The School of Nursing prepared me for any type of nursing field. I never thought I would end up in public health administration, but nursing is a great career with lots of opportunities," she says.