Harnessing the Power of AANP Grants and Scholarships
Discover how nurse practitioners and students can thrive with professional funding support from their association.
Every year, the American Association of Nurse Practitioners® (AANP) demonstrates its support for the nurse practitioner (NP) community by offering grants and scholarships to deserving individuals to support their project or course of study. In 2025, a total of $138,500 in professional funding was awarded to 35 individuals through three grants and 32 scholarships.
Grant recipient Denise Schentrup, APRN, DNP, and scholarship recipient Lily Schroeder, RN, BSN, CEN, spoke to AANP about their backgrounds, goals and how financial assistance in the form of a grant or scholarship will positively impact what they hope to accomplish as professionals.
Rural Communities and Technological Breakthroughs
Dr. Denise Schentrup is a family nurse practitioner (FNP) based in Gainesville, Florida. After graduating from the University of Florida and then working in the ICU, she realized she felt some dissatisfaction at “not being able to connect with the patients, even though it was really interesting because it was a lot of critical thinking,” she recalls. Schentrup returned to school and became an FNP, and now she works closely with patients in rural practice at the University of Florida’s college of nursing.
Schentrup is also passionate about diabetes care and rural health. The grant she received from AANP was the result of a proposed project called “A Comprehensive Teleretinal Program: Preserving Vision in Rural America.” The project revolves around improving “diabetic retinopathy (DR) screening rates in a rural community by implementing a teleretinal screening program using the EyePACS® system,” as per her grant application.
The project was conceived when Schentrup and her colleagues observed the low DR screening rates in rural communities. They discovered this was due, in part, to the long wait time to see providers and/or transportation issues. “When we were referring patients to the ophthalmologist in the next town over where they would need to go, the lag time for them to get an appointment was significantly long. It was months before they could even be seen,” she says. In addition, “we found people lacked the transportation to get to the appointments, because the ophthalmologist is about 15 miles away — which doesn’t sound like a lot to somebody who has transportation, but to somebody who doesn’t have transportation, that’s a significant distance. They can’t walk; they can’t take the bus.” Taking these two factors into account, along with the financial burden of receiving care, Schentrup and her team decided to create an opportunity out of a health care crisis.
At a conference, Schentrup learned about the EyePACS® teleretinal camera, and she was inspired. “I thought, well, that would be something that would be really helpful for our patients in our area. Not only to close those care gaps, but also to make sure that we can diagnose it [DR] early enough so they can get treatment.” This particular screening tool is unique in that it can be used in an office, where a photo is taken of the retina. The photo then gets uploaded, and “an ophthalmologist reads it and then sends us back a report,” she says. “So, all of it is done via telemed, basically, and we can get the information that we need. If there’s a diagnosis [of DR], then we can get the patient in quicker to the specialist.”
The implementation of this screening tool in rural areas could cut through the financial, transportation and scheduling burdens, it may also have a benefit on the backend for NPs in rural areas. From the project proposal: “Another problem NPs face is the reimbursement structure for provided services. NP reimbursement is typically 20% lower than physician reimbursement. This can impact the sustainability of services in practices. If teleretinal services are not fully reimbursable, this will impact the sustainability of the program.”
What Schentrup hopes to learn — to the benefit of other NPs working in other rural areas — is how sustainable this reimbursement may be. “In rural health clinics, the billing is different than a fee for service model,” she says. The grant funding “will help us to create this program and determine if it’s sustainable, which, if we determine it is, I know there’s a lot of rural health clinics across the country that potentially would want to adopt this screening.”
Helping patients keep their vision intact is of both professional and personal importance to Schentrup: “It’s something that I’m very passionate about because I have very bad vision problems. I don’t have diabetes but just being early on the diagnoses and then helping with treatment is something I feel like our patients deserve, because they can’t function if they can’t see. If they lose their sight, they can’t work, they can’t fully participate in activities in society.”
The preparation of the grant application was a joint labor between Schentrup and her colleague Tina Bricker, PhD, APRN, FNP-BC, FAHA. While Schentrup felt it was a “longshot” to obtain an AANP grant, she reassured herself that “if you don’t apply, you’re not going to get it. But when we found out that we got it, I was shocked and ecstatic, really.” Furthermore, receiving the grant makes the project seem that much more real, and necessary: “We’re going to get it done.”
Travel Nursing and Educational Opportunities
Lily Schroeder is studying to become an NP, having begun her career in health care as a phlebotomist 18 years ago. “I did that for six years, and then I jumped right into the emergency department in my hometown of Ketchikan, Alaska,” she recalls. With just 8,000 residents, Schroeder says that “per Alaskan standards [Ketchikan’s] kind of a moderate-sized town,” though one where she witnessed barriers to care firsthand. “I saw a lot of people that struggled not having access to specialists, so cardiology, orthopedics, things like that […] My very own sister had a kidney transplant when she was 19 years old, and Ketchikan didn’t and doesn’t have the capacity to treat. She had to have all of her care in Seattle.”
Following her time in Alaska, Schroeder became a travel nurse, and then “started doing international medical volunteer trips.” She traveled to Guatemala, and then to a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh. Schroeder explains that her interest in travel nursing “came from being on a small island — I had an urge to explore the world. When I had the opportunity to do my first medical mission trip in Guatemala, I just fell in love because…it’s kind of difficult to explain, but you really get a sense of the need of a group of people.
Schroeder determined to become an NP after experiencing some of the limitations of what she could do as a travel nurse. While working for a Montana-based relief organization called Hands on Global, she journeyed to “the remote Indian Himalayas, way up north,” working as the “clinical coordinator for the trip.” She recalls that “I was responsible for 16 people…and as a nurse, I can do a lot. I can run the pharmacy, I can do the labs, I can do the wounds, I can do all these different things and manage all these providers and health care workers. But I couldn’t see patients, and I couldn’t treat them in that regard.” An NP on the trip encouraged her to go back to school. “I thought, you know, I love this work so much. I’m so passionate about it. If I went on to get my NP, then I really could do it all.”
However, first comes an intense amount of schooling at a tremendous cost. “In this program, tuition alone is a hundred thousand dollars,” she says, “but then looking into student loans… I think it was a 7.5% interest rate on a student loan when I started the program,” she says. “We don’t have enough providers, and it’s like, man, to pay 7.5% on a hundred thousand dollars is just something I decided I couldn’t do. So, if I’m going to do this program, I’m going to either be working and extra stressed all the time, or I’m going to have to get scholarships and do whatever I can so that I don’t have to come out of it with that kind of burden. I am still working, but getting this scholarship through AANP has allowed me not to stress…having scholarship help with the financial burden allows me to focus on the didactic and clinical portion of the program and not have to be so concerned about my normal working hours.”
Like Schentrup, Schroeder has practical advice to any NP weighing whether or not to apply for a grant or scholarship. “One of my favorite sayings is: ‘The answer is always no if you don’t ask.’ My entire undergraduate degree was paid for by scholarships, and it does take work. You have to put in the work, you have to reach out to people that are going to give you references. You have to write the essays and take the time for the application, but in the end it’s worth it.”
Professional Funding Support for NPs
Funding for 2026 AANP Grants and Scholarships will open early next year! In the meantime, we invite you to explore a variety of professional funding opportunities. Along with AANP programs such as the AANP National NP History Grant award and the International Advanced Nurse Ambassador Program — you’ll also find a curated list of external opportunities designed to support your growth, innovation and impact as an NP.