Ellie Slette is leaving a 41-year nursing/teaching career where she's helped 3,500 nurses enter the profession at hospitals and clinics throughout the Midwest.

Although Slette retired June 31 as associate dean of nursing at Century College, she isn't slowing down. She's deeply involved in her passion of promoting holistic healing, encouraging minorities to enter nursing and working for legislation to reduce cancer-causing substances in the environment.

An avid reader and gardener, she's also busy working with a partner to build a second home in the northern woods of Minnesota that is environmentally friendly and energy efficient, using super insulation and solar panels and not depending on oil and gas for heat and utilities.

Throughout her teaching career, Slette's been an advocate for nursing empowerment, although she says nursing education was the last thing she expected to do when she earned her diploma. "I never envisioned myself being a teacher because I was afraid to speak in front of a group."

Slette's been a strong advocate of minority recruitment at Century College, located in a suburb of Minneapolis/St. Paul, where she's spent 10 years as a clinical instructor and 18 as an administrator. She said she experienced one of her happiest moments a couple of years ago when the first four graduating nursing students to cross the stage for their degrees were African American.

Minority enrollment has gone from virtually zero at Century College in the early 1990s to about 20 percent in the current graduating class of 160 students, half of them belonging to a joint program at nearby Inver Hills Community College, said Slette, who worked on grants to recruit minorities.

"We literally set up case management for students of color-African Americans, Asians, Hispanics and Native Americans-that understands their needs better and resulted in major changes in the nursing curriculum."

Slette recieved her nursing diploma from the Lutheran General and Deaconess Hospitals School of Nursing in Park Ridge, Ill., and worked as a med/surg nurse and clinical manager of a hospital orthopedic unit before going into teaching full time.

She's a strong advocate of holistic healing in an age of technology and passes this passion for mind/body interaction on to her students.

"There's a true connection between the body and the mind, they're not separate from each other," said Slette, who will be offering workshops as a master instructor for nonprofit Birch Tree Center for Healthcare Transformation.

The classes, "Reawakeneing the Heart of Nursing," focus on how the body's energy fields are connected to the healing process. Slette is on the leadership council for the American Holistic Nurses' Association, which promotes and guides nurses in the field.

Slette said she also will remain active with the regional Women's Cancer Resource Center, an activist group that links environmental causes of cancer to the practices of some big businesses, and which seeks legislation to remove known cancer-causing agents from chemicals and pesticides.

One activity Slette linked to the college was a program that helped seniors with health conditions and other needs and tried to keep them in their homes as long as possible. Nursing students were required to spend 15 hours per semester caring for the seniors in some capacity.

As a teaching leader, Slette said she'd meet with each graduating class to gather their input and consider their viewpoints when deciding on changes in the curriculum. She also met with individual students who needed advice or guidance. "This included everything from academic problems to social stressors they faced as nursing students. I felt I was there to serve them and mold them into being professional nurses as best I could, in an adult-to-adult relationship."