In this third year of the Off the Chart: Rewarding Nursing Greatness campaign, the Simms/Mann Family Foundation was delighted to recognize 40 new honorees — 10 each from Cedars-Sinai, City of Hope, Keck Medicine of USC, and UCLA Health — who embody the Off the Chart attributes of a bias towards action, capacity for self-direction, originality and creative instincts, courageous and bold thinking, and the potential to achieve even more. This new cohort brings the total number of Off the Chart recipients to 110 nurses, all of whom remain in the nursing profession and continue to show exceptional leadership and expertise in caring for their fellow humans and future generations.
On May 28, 2025, the Foundation hosted more than 200 guests at the Museum of Tolerance. Leaders from our partner healthcare systems, philanthropy and the community, together with current and past honorees, joined us to enthusiastically celebrate Nursing Greatness!
To kick off the event, the world’s leading Poetic Voice, Sekou Andrews, delivered a powerful performance highlighting what it means to have a “love affair with healthcare.”
After remarks from Foundation Executive Director Rachel Barchie and Foundation President Victoria Mann Simms, PhD, Dr. Simms was joined on stage for a conversation with Johnese Spisso, MPA, President of UCLA Health and Shawna Butler, RN, MBA, nurse economist and co-architect of Off the Chart. The conversation emphasized the critical role of nurses as leaders, changemakers and catalysts for innovation, and the importance of investing in nurses to build and maintain healthy workforces and healthy communities.
We have to keep nourishing nurses. Philanthropy [gives us] the ability to have more creativity and more innovation.
After a video presentation spotlighting the individual nurse recipients, Sekou Andrews and Shawna Butler returned to the stage with a roll call of the nursing specialties represented by the honorees, the “ABCs of Nursing.”
We were honored to be joined at the event by reporters from ABC-7 Los Angeles, the Beverly Hills Courier, and the Jewish Journal, which along with several other outlets provided excellent coverage of the Off the Chart campaign. Click here to read our Year 3 press release and please view a selection of media placements below:
As we wrap up the third year of our minimum three-year commitment to the Off the Chart campaign, the original objective to spotlight the critical role of the highly skilled nurses holding together our strained healthcare systems in order to galvanize investment in their work is as salient as ever. Recent estimates project that by 2027, almost 900,000 — nearly one-fifth of the 4.5 million registered nurses — intend to leave the workforce, taking with them an estimated two million years of nursing expertise.
The International Council of Nurses (ICN) 2025 report “Our Nurses. Our Future. Caring for Nurses Strengthens Economies” provides further evidence of the strain many nurses are experiencing due to chronic underinvestment. “A strong, well-supported nursing workforce is more critical than ever to address global health challenges and support healthy, productive populations,” said ICN’s President, Dr. Pamela Cipriano.
It is now time to...move nurses from 'invisible' to 'invaluable' across all regions.”
Stay tuned for another blog post in the coming weeks about the impact of the Off the Chart campaign to-date, and what’s next for nursing support!
