About WALD
The Kansas Public Health Workforce and Leadership Development (WALD) Center is a web-based public health education, training, and research center. The WALD Center makes use of technology to foster social capital and increase workforce capacity among Kansas’s public health workers.
The WALD Center coordinates several major public health projects, enabling
a continuous preparedness, information, and education endeavor for the largely
rural Kansas public health workforce. This allows for the promotion of competency-based
public health workforce development and leadership in the state.
The WALD Center’s name is not only an acronym for Workforce and Leadership Development; the name also pays tribute to a great public health nursing pioneer, Lillian D. Wald.
Lillian D. Wald was moved by the miserable and unhealthy conditions she witnessed in the tenements of New York City’s Lower East Side.
In 1893, two years after graduation from the New York Hospital Training School for Nurses, Ms. Wald founded the forerunner of the Henry Street Settlement in New York City. Henry Street eventually evolved into the Visiting Nurse Service of New York City and was directed by Ms. Wald for more than 40 years.
The WALD Center continues Lillian D. Wald’s orientation towards partnership and people today. It was created in January 1999 out of a multi-agency partnership in the area of public health workforce and leadership development. These partners include:
- Office of Local and Rural Health, Kansas Department of Health and Environment
- Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health, University of Kansas School of Medicine-Wichita
- Kansas Association of Local Health Departments
- University of Kansas Public Management Center
- Heartland Centers for Public Health Workforce Development, Saint Louis University School of Public Health
The WALD Center partnership focuses on the educational and
training needs of individual public health workers. It provides a model for
workforce development and leadership training and serves as a virtual career
ladder, enhancing the public health community’s capacity for growth,
change, and service.
“Perhaps no work that is at once scientific and immediately concerned with the happiness and well-being of men and women ever bestowed benefits comparable to those achieved in the struggle toward a higher level of health.”
-Lillian Wald
For more information, contact the WALD Center at 316-293-1817, or e-mail kkabler@kumc.edu.
