Days after COVID‐19 physical distancing precautions were implemented, a coalition of community leaders in Baltimore City founded the Baltimore Neighbors Network (BNN), a volunteer network established to provide proactive phone‐based support to older adults in Baltimore City. BNN was a community‐driven approach aimed at reducing social isolation and improving health equity both during the pandemic and long‐term. This paper describes how the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing's (JHUSON) public health nursing clinical faculty and students partnered with BNN to support a community‐driven crisis response effort while creatively meeting student learning objectives. While engaging in the work of BNN remotely, nursing students were able to meet competencies across all eight domains of the Quad Council Coalition of Public Health Nursing Organizations. Schools of Nursing throughout the country can use this partnership as a model of a service‐learning strategy for public health nursing education during a crisis.

We reviewed research that examines racism as an independent variable and one or more health outcomes as dependent variables in Black American adults aged 50 years and older in the USA. Of the 43 studies we reviewed, most measured perceived interpersonal racism, perceived institutional racism, or residential segregation. The only two measures of structural racism were birth and residence in a “Jim Crow state.” Fourteen studies found associations between racism and mental health outcomes, five with cardiovascular outcomes, seven with cognition, two with physical function, two with telomere length, and five with general health/other health outcomes. Ten studies found no significant associations in older Black adults. All but six of the studies were cross-sectional. Research to understand the extent of structural and multilevel racism as a social determinant of health and the impact on older adults specifically is needed. Improved measurement tools could help address this gap in science.

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