About WikiWisdom Reports
The most active members, the “thought leaders,” craft a set of recommendations. Thought leaders that emerge in the online conversation are chosen to work with the moderator to shape the key ideas into a set of recommendations for top management. The WikiWisdom team turns these discussions and recommendations into a report. The thought leaders group present the report and recommendations to the sponsor/leader.
Our Projects
Re-imagining Boston Public Schools
Following a year of living through the COVID-19 pandemic and its upending of much of what school has looked like, leaders of Boston Public Schools and Boston Teachers Union reached out to their staff/members to gain insight into how the district might best reimagine its schools moving forward.
Standing Up for Truth: The Role of Libraries in the Mis/Disinformation Age
This report lays out the support needed to help librarians do their part to create an informed and engaged citizenry.
“This report should be read by every health care and political leader in our country. If we listen to nurses, protect nurses in their workplace, and give nurses a voice at the table, we will all be safer and healthier”
–Maureen “Shawn” Kennedy, MA, RN, FAAN, Editor in Chief of the American Journal of Nursing, published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.
Frontline Nurses
Wisdom from Nurses So We Never Again Mishandle a National Healthcare Crisis
This was supposed to be the Year of the Nurse and the Midwife. Instead, it has been the year of COVID-19.
Nurses across the U.S. were tested by COVID-19. Some broke down. Others found energy and pride in the struggle to care for COVID-19 patients without adequate protective equipment, staff, or support from hospital administration or the federal government.
The US already faces a shortage of nurses—the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects we will need 11 million more nurses by 2026. That is partly the result of demographic realities: an aging baby boom and an aging nursing population edging closer to retirement. Equally important are skyrocketing rates of burnout among nurses. Add the stresses of COVID-19 and a steady trickle of nurses turning away from the profession could turn into a stampede.
Nurses often put their patients’ needs before their own. That didn’t change during the pandemic. What did change is that nurses saw the level of sacrifice asked of them and denounced their working conditions under COVID-19 as both unfair and dangerous.
Through the recommendations in this report, nurses ask for three things: Listen to nurses. Protect nurses. Support nurses. None of those is hard to do. However, they all require that policy makers and healthcare administrators who are unused to soliciting nurses’ input learn to take nurses’ ideas seriously. And they require elected leaders to ensure nurses have the supplies and supports they need to do their work safely and with integrity.
This WikiWisdom Forum report is the first step. It started with a unique online forum that asked nurses on the frontlines to share their stories, challenges, fears and joys from caring for COVID-19 patients.
There are dramatic stories of nurses who risked their lives to help their patients despite a lack of adequate PPE. There are disgraceful stories of insufficient support from management, even retaliation for steps taken to protect patients and staff. And there are heartbreaking stories of nurses who didn’t hug their children for weeks in an effort to keep them safe.
SEL Amid a Pandemic + National Awakening to Systemic Racism
When the coronavirus shut down schools in March, it left the entire education community – students, families, faculty, staff and the larger community – traumatized. Then came the murder of George Floyd and the protests that rocked communities throughout California and around the world.
It was in this moment of enormous upheaval that Beyond Differences, with funding from the Marin Community Foundation, wanted to hear from educators about what is working, and what else is needed to ensure that social and emotional conditions for learning, nurturing relationships, and attention to mental health and well-being are prioritized for all our students and staff.
Using a unique WikiWisdom forum, 644 educators posted 196 ideas and 338 comments in answer to these questions:
• How might COVID-19 enable new approaches to the social and emotional aspects of learning next fall–or whenever we re-enter our schools?
• What is working to support well-being, build relationships and prioritize Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), right now?
• What barriers prevent you from integrating SEL more into your work?
• What supports do you need to integrate SEL equitably into your practices–especially with remote learning?
Mind the Gap: Preparing Nurses to Practice with Resilience & Integrity
One of the many things the coronavirus pandemic taught us is the importance of mental health and resilience among nurses, who have been on the frontlines since the beginning.
While there is so much science, technology, and protocol to be taught in nursing school, those lessons must be integrated with teaching nurses how to take care of themselves, how to advocate for their patients, how to push back against ethical lapses, and how to stay resilient in the face of overwhelming emotional upheaval.
There are critical challenges facing the profession, not the least of which is that as many as half of nurses polled in 2019 said they had considered changing careers. And that was BEFORE the pandemic! At the same time, enrollment in Schools of Nursing surged during the pandemic.
How will we retain and sustain the students we educate? How will we prepare faculty to model and integrate these skills in their teaching?
To learn how nursing schools and nurse residency programs can bridge this gap and better prepare nurses in the future, the Resilient Nurses Initiative of Maryland partnered with WikiWisdom to hear from nursing students, nurses, and educators. The project was funded by a Nurse Support Program II Grant administered by the Maryland Higher Education Commission and funded through the Health Services Cost Review Commission.
Mission Health
The frontline workers in patient care—the registered nurses who work throughout the Mission Health System—shared their ideas for improving patient care, retaining experienced nurses, and bringing joy back to their profession.
School Safety After Sandy Hook
Creating a positive learning environment and safety in classrooms and school buildings.
Minnesota Youth Council
We asked Minnesota high school students to tell us what challenges they face and propose solutions to those problems.
Advancing Women in the Workplace
In partnership with Bentley University’s Center for Women and Business we asked about solutions to eliminate the obstacles to the advancement of women in the workplace.