Bringing together passions for nursing, community, and policy
Growing up in rural Alaska shaped Charlotte Brown’s interest in health care access, while being a Perry World House Student Fellow and Benjamin Franklin Scholar expanded her horizons.
Charlotte Brown recalls a childhood climbing up and falling out of trees, picking blueberries in the mountains and currants in the woods, and paddling down her backyard creek on snow sleds with her three younger brothers—“lots of just being outside, being happy, being rained on,” she says.
The fourth-year School of Nursing student grew up surrounded by community in Wasilla, Alaska. (“I like to call it rural-ish, because in Alaska, it is a booming metropolis of 9,000 people, but my friends at Penn have felt like it was less of a raging city,” she jokes.) Her father is a pastor, and without extended family nearby, “I had adopted aunties and uncles and grandmas in the church who would take care of us.” There were always people in her home, and her mother always had coffee, cookies, and tea out to share.