National Nurses United

Mini Features 1/9/07 1:22 PM Page 12 CNA's Huli Retires, Progressive Movement Mourns Giuliana Milanese, who most recently worked as CNA/NNOC's community organizer, retired in November after a more than 40-year career of working for social change, the last decade of which she spent with CNA. But the firebrand Milanese vows to keep raising hell. "I just won't get paid for it," she quips. People who know Milanese, affectionately called "Huli" by all her friends, may be surprised to hear that she wasn't always the wisecracking, die-hard social activist she is today. She is notorious for her brash talk – "Hey babe, you gotta do this favor for me or I'll get fired!" – and her outrageous sense of humor. Her standard uniform is a turtleneck under an oversized flannel plaid shirt, and eyeglasses dangling from her granny chain. She likes to wear a little blue button declaring that "Robin Hood was right." Actually, it was only when Milanese entered her 20s, and returned to her hometown of Oakland after a life-changing trip to her family's native Italy, that she started taking a hard look at the inequities surrounding her. "It was 1965, and I remember sitting on the bus, and seeing these older black women still riding up into the hills to clean houses after a whole lifetime of working their butts off," said Milanese. "That developed my consciousness, to think about their situation compared to my family, who started off as immigrants but worked hard and were able to buy a house and become middle class." It was only a short hop from there for Milanese to get involved in the Civil Rights Movement and anti-racist campaigns. She got a job as the director of a local youth center, and credits a lot of her early political development to a Reverend Eckels, the minister of a black church in East Oakland. "Rev. Eckels had me go to white churches to talk about racism, the effect of racism on black people and how we benefited from it," she said. "I realized that if you live a white life, you're very ignorant about a lot of things." The next momentous event was a 1970 trip to Cuba, during which Milanese met Bill Sorro, the veteran Filipino American political activist and organizer who would soon become her husband. The two eventually moved back to the states, and the next few decades for Milanese were a whirlwind of raising kids, working at 12 REGISTERED NURSE restaurants (to this day she is known for her Italian cooking and famous spaghetti sauce), and continuing to fight in the political and nonprofit sector for social justice. Milanese and Sorro lived at the IHotel in San Francisco in 1973, and were active in the struggle between the residential hotel's low-income, ethnic residents who wanted to continue living there, and the developers who wanted to tear it down in the name of urban renewal. In 1995, Milanese joined CNA as a community organizer, a job that entails recruiting and educating RNs to build relationships with people outside the organization and to solicit support from the public. One of her first jobs was to organize 14 pregnant patients to write letters to the editor about their hospital's effort to downsize its OB/GYN unit. Another effort was to organize the local Russian community to save an ER that was scheduled to shut down. Yet another time, she arranged for one nurse to give a sermon at a church on the problems with managed care. She has worked on numerous campaigns: for single-payer healthcare, for ratios, and for campaign finance reform. Milanese has worked so tirelessly on so many important social justice causes that the San Francisco Board of Supervisors recently honored her by declaring Nov. 15 "Giuliana Milanese Day." "The thing about my job that I loved the most was I loved working with nurses," said Milanese. "These are working people who can enlighten and raise consciousness. The public listens to nurses." Milanese says that, today, fighting for people's access to decent healthcare has become a vehicle to challenge the whole system. "If you have a nurse base and a community base, those two together are a powerful force for social change and healthcare." Now that she's retired, Milanese plans to devote her time to young people. She serves on the board of two youth organizations, one focusing on affordable housing and jobs and another called Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth. To her, the most important thing she can do now is foster young people to pick up and continue the important work that still needs to be done to wipe out injustice. "I'm very angry about the world that the new generation is inheriting," she said. "There was a time when you could work hard and get something. No more. But I'll never give up my hope. The youth give me hope." —staff report W W W. C A L N U R S E S . O R G DECEMBER 2006

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