Contact: Helen Saffran, 718-488-1419
Bushwick Resident Lula Mae Phillips Awarded
Hearst Foundation Scholarship to Study Child Abuse
Brooklyn, NY--Nursing Professor Lula Mae Phillips of Long Island University's Brooklyn Campus is among a select group of 21 nurses in the metropolitan New York area chosen to participate in a new program in the study of child abuse offered at New York Foundling Hospital's Vincent J. Fontana Center for Child Protection.
Sponsored by a $100,000 award from the William Hearst Foundation, the nine-month scholarship program is geared to empower nurses to take leadership roles in the area of child abuse/neglect.
In 1998, Phillips began the Long Island University Childhood Wellness Program, volunteering her time along with 20 nursing students and nursing graduates from the Brooklyn Campus to teach in a continuous six-week program at the Salvation Army-run Bushwick Family Residence in Brooklyn. The course is geared to inform parents--mainly single mothers--and their children about nutrition, safety and health. Recently she has expanded her effort at this site to include rap groups with teenagers who have suffered abuse and have negative acting-out behavior, while helping their parents to learn "positive parenting."
For the past eleven years, Phillips and her sister, who reside in Bushwick, have opened their hearts to the homeless by becoming foster parents. Currently they are caring for five children.
The latest figures released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Children, Youth and Families indicated that just under one million children were victims of substantial or suspected child abuse or neglect.
"Every health care provider needs to learn what is offered in this intense nine-month class, not only nurses," says Phillips. "The more I learn about child abuse, the more I am stunned by its seriousness."
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