Cindy Sickora: Leading and Learning Through Community-Academic Partnerships

By TERRA OSTERLING

For Cindy Sickora, community health has always been central to nursing practice. Now director of faculty practice initiatives at the University at Buffalo School of Nursing, Sickora has spent her career building nurse-led, community-academic partnerships that bring care directly to where people live while providing students opportunities to learn to deliver high-quality, culturally responsive care.

That approach is now shaping childhood vaccination efforts across Western New York, where UB nursing faculty and students are staffing mobile vaccination clinics. The model reflects decades of Sickora’s work at the intersection of education, practice, research and community need.  

Sickora’s commitment to community-based care took shape early in her career.  She stepped into her first leadership role in community academic partnership while a student in Rutgers University’s doctorate program. At the time she was also teaching community health nursing at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (integrated into Rutgers in 2013). For her doctoral capstone project, she designed and implemented a nurse led and nursing student-staffed mobile health unit to provide elder care at a New Jersey public housing community.

“I taught my students that sick care takes place in the hospital and health care can take place anywhere,” Sickora said.

The Jordan and Harris Community Health Center was funded by a Health Resources Services Administration (HRSA) grant in 2010 and launched in 2011. It began simply with a folding table and chairs on a sidewalk and nursing students learning to take blood pressure and talk with residents.

Over a decade, the project grew into an interprofessional program that included students in nursing, medicine, physical therapy, respiratory therapy, nutrition and dentistry. More than 600 nursing students participated in the program under Sickora’s leadership while delivering education, preventative services and follow-up care.

In 2015 the program became the grant-operated Rutgers Community Health Center, serving multiple Newark housing communities by providing high-quality, primary care services regardless of patients’ ability to pay. Funders were HRSA and the Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey. Also in 2015, the program was designated a nurse-led federally qualified health center, one of just a few in the nation and the only one in New Jersey.

“We went in with humility,” Sickora recalled of the 2011 program launch. “Along the way, nursing students learned the big picture of barriers to health care and how to better understand the realities of patients’ lives.”

Sickora took the concept a step further by recruiting residents to work as an extension of the caregiving teams, employing them to check on their neighbors’ needs related to food access, housing stability, medication adherence and transportation to doctors’ visits.

She later brought this model to the University of Texas at San Antonio. That practice, Wellness 360, grew from a three-clinic grant-funded project to a 14-clinic, self-sustaining nursing clinical enterprise.

Nearly two decades later, and several successful and nationally recognized community-academic partnerships throughout Newark, New Jersey, and San Antonio, Texas, Sickora has brought this approach to community health to UB. Since her arrival, Sickora has expanded faculty practice and the community-academic partnership model to address childhood vaccination gaps across the region.

In August 2025, UB nursing faculty and students staffed mobile vaccination clinics to administer childhood vaccines required for Buffalo Public Schools students to begin the academic year protected and ready to learn. The vaccines were administered at no cost to families.

“This collaboration with the Erie County Department of Health, Buffalo Public Schools, and our nursing student and faculty mobile units resulted in 1,169 vaccines administered to 591 children and reduced the ‘exclusion from school due to vaccine’ by 88%,” Sickora said.

A second childhood vaccine initiative was launched last fall, funded by the New York Health Foundation to expand its Mobile Vaccine Initiative (M-VAX), to improve childhood vaccination rates across Erie County and Western New York.

“The goal is to administer childhood vaccines to 1,500 kids in rural and urban communities across the area, and to have our nursing students providing these supervised vaccination clinics in community centers, churches, schools and any place the community members themselves want to host our mobile unit,” Sickora said.

Sickora also sees these initiatives as opportunities to advance health and nursing research. “We’re there not only to provide care, but also to learn why there remains a need, whether it is vaccine hesitancy or if there are other obstacles to getting vaccines,” she said. 

For students, the mobile clinics offer training beyond technical skills. Students learn to adapt their practice to context; they also learn safety protocols, patient communication and team-based care while developing cultural awareness and clinical judgment in real-world settings.

“Students multiply the nursing application because in this model they are not limited to menial tasks. They are building skills, including cultural sensitivities, as part of a team making a difference, and it’s all teachable moments,” Sickora said. “When they begin their careers, they will be empowered to think about the patient’s community experience.”

Looking ahead, Sickora is exploring needs among adults in Western New York for flu, shingles or pneumococcal vaccines.

“Vaccines clinics are just the beginning for what a community health practice can look like and accomplish for both UB School of Nursing students and our neighbors throughout the area,” Sickora said.

That philosophy has guided Sickora’s work across an impactful career. It represents a comprehensive vision of nursing that integrates clinical practice, education and research through authentic partnerships with communities.

Grounded in humility and shaped by unique needs of individuals and neighborhoods, her approach strengthens student learning, improves community health access and outcomes, and advances the profession through knowledge generation and demonstrating the vital impact of nurse-led care.