Members of the NurseManifest team have issued a call for nurses to join together in signing a 2025 Nurses Declaration of Solidarity and Resistance, indicating our commitment to stand together, act to resist that which harms health and well-being, protect those who are harmed, and build coalitions that move toward the ideals we seek.  Nurses stand on a long and strong legacy of political activism that arises from our moral imperative to actively promote public policy that assures social/health equity. Nursing’s extensive theoretical foundation, and our knowledge derived from ethical, aesthetic, personal and emancipatory knowing leads us to take action, and provides the substance that constitutes our purpose in taking action. Nurses worldwide are invited to join with other nurses to engage in determined action to protect health and justice for all, regardless of age, social/economic circumstance, ability, religion, skin color, race, country of origin, sexual orientation or gender identity. To join this movement, add your signature to the 2025 Declaration of Solidarity and Resistance! For inspiration about actions to take, see our “Resources for Action,”

The 2025 Declaration builds on the 2017 Declaration, issued during the early days of the first Trump administration. Within a few weeks, 2,215 nurses had signed on to the 2017 Declaration. Now it is 2025, and we have new avenues and resources for dealing with health crises, some of which emerged during the 2020-22 COVID-19 pandemic. Having lived through the first Trump term, and the pandemic, nurses are prepared for almost anything that comes along. And now, many nurses are even more deeply concerned, even horrified, that not only are we re-experiencing the health-damaging traumas of 2017, we are witnessing even more dreadful and devastating effects of government action. But as Sally Thorne explains in her March 2025 Nursing Inquiry editorial, “We were made for these times.”

We will not be mandated to engage in hateful acts, acts of division and furthering disadvantage, policies that expand the privilege of the few and cause pain and distress in the many. As we showed so clearly during the COVID-19 pandemic, we will not be cowed by fear or self-interest, rather we will continue to do what nurses have always strived to do in optimizing health and health equity in the fullest sense of those terms for all. We are a force for good in this world, and we have always understood that as our mission and our privilege. (Thorne, 2025)

Take a few moments today to read more about the 2025 Declaration, and join the many nurses who share a passion to take action, and join with others in a strong coalition to resist the harms, protect others at risk, and create a foundation for a future in which this sort of erosion of human health and well-being can never happen again.