Bold Innovator

Dr. Megan Voss says the Mayo Clinic brought her to Minnesota, but the University of Minnesota kept her here. The now-Director of Education for the Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing arrived in 2006 to intern and work as an RN in the oncology department at Mayo, and a year later she was applying to the Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) Integrative Health and Healing specialty program offered by the University’s School of Nursing.

“[Between] the demands of the system and working in oncology, I was faced with a bit of death and dying early on in my career and traditional nursing school didn’t prepare me for the care of the mind, body, and spirit for the person in the bed — or preserve my own mind, body, and spirit for a career faced with lots of death and dying,” she says.

Her Bakken Center classes, included in her DNP program, proved transformational: “The courses provided greater depth of understanding of the human experience and impacted people’s wellbeing at their core,” she says. It didn’t hurt that Bakken Center Director Dr. Mary Jo Kreitzer became her mentor.

“Mary Jo,” Voss says, “is a visionary who dreams and leads fearlessly. That was eye-opening to me—not only the types of possibilities she saw in clinical care situations, but also in people.”

Whether Voss realized it at the time, a fated path forward seemed to be forging. “I became integrated because the things I cared about deeply in personal life could be a part of nursing. I didn’t have to compartmentalize those things as something separate from my nursing practice.”

So, Voss says, she didn’t envision having a leadership role at the Center back in grad school, but she did know she wanted to work with Kreitzer. “She remained a constant even when my roles changed,” Voss says. In fact, Kreitzer sought Voss out at one point, inviting her to coffee to discuss a leadership role within the Pediatric Blood and Bone Marrow Transplant program at MHealth/Fairview, headed by Dr. John Wagner.

Voss said yes. “She was really responsible for developing probably the first integrative pediatric blood and bone marrow transplant program in the country,” Kreitzer says. “She made such a difference. It’s an enormous challenge to build a new clinical program, and that is essentially what she did. Megan has the intellect, the creative capacity, and the ability to establish trust and relationships that enabled her to do that.”

Voss went on to inhabit other teaching and leadership roles within the Center at the U, and so it felt natural to oversee and collaborate with faculty, staff, and students as the director of education.

“The Center’s teaching philosophy is different,” she says. “So many students say Center courses keep them whole and help them get though other programs of study. That rang true for me when I was a student . . . I always wanted to be a part of that transformation for other students.” And, as students will tell you, having an instructor who also maintains a clinical practice, as Voss does, helps keep her tethered to the real-time demands of the workplace students will eventually matriculate to—literally practicing what she preaches.

Voss says she’s especially proud of being an important part of the team that overhauled the Health Coaching curriculum to meet more real-world challenges, alongside making it more accessible and increasing the diversity of both the student body and faculty.

She also is the faculty advisor to the Student Advisory Leadership Council, where she sees her role as “lifting student voices, sharing governance, and allowing their concerns to be heard and ideas they have to transform the way we provide education.”

Erin Fider, student services and academic programs coordinator at the Center, says Voss’ varied roles perfectly primed her to lead. “Megan is able to bring all those different personal perspectives—as a student, faculty member, and staff. She is really being that connective tissue between people who are making decisions and people who are needing to implement them, and able to advocate on that level. . . it opens possibilities we hadn’t thought of before, having her having been in these roles before that and looking at different program areas.” Fider notes that Voss is not a leader who gives directives, but links people as a team, empowering them to find the right solutions with their shared wisdom.

Kreitzer concurs. “She leads by being an effective role model. She’s very bold and innovative and doesn’t hold back. But she is also a more quiet, gentle leader. She really leads by example and the power of her ideas. By virtue of the relationship she establishes, people have trust and when people have trust in a colleague or leader, it makes it exciting to follow a new path.”

“Gone are the patriarchal days with students giving everything to their grad programs and graduating a shell of their former selves,” Voss says. “They need to continue being who they are: a mother, working nurse, someone on active duty in the military. Our job is to make education work for people and keep them whole throughout this experience—and feel more fulfilled at the end of educational experience, which is the same as the movement toward whole-person care,” she says. “People are seeking unity and healing, and that’s a lot of what the Center has always offered.”