About Us

RNegade: Evolutionary Education For Revolutionary Nurses

RNegade is a community for nurses, by nurses, who are ready to break the mold. We're the innovators, the disruptors, the wave-makers who are passionate about creating positive change in the nursing profession. Our aim is to disrupt continuing nursing education by making it feel lazy, with content that edu-tains, enhances skills, ignites potential, cultivates self-determination, happiness, and inspires hope for the future through the artistry of common sense.

Here's How We Started

Spring of 2022 rolled around, and you know what that means—time for the traditional, last-minute CE scramble as my nursing license renewal loomed. To spice things up, I thought I’d treat myself to some psychoneuroimmunological, educational cotton candy candy from the Institute for Brain Potential: four six-hour lectures, served fresh on Compact Discs. Only problem? I hadn’t owned a CD player since the 80's. So, off I went to buy one, dreaming of uploading the content to my computer and bingeing my way through 24 hours of continuing education like it was Netflix.

 

Spoiler alert: The discs were locked tighter than Fort Knox.

 

Faced with the grim prospect of being tethered to my desk for the next 24 hours, I did what any sane person would do—I threw on my hiking boots, shoved in my AirPods, and hit the trails with a podcast for some much-needed distraction.

 

Enter stage left: proGRESStination. I was patting myself on the back for “making progress” while avoiding the CE grind. My podcast featured James Nestor, the guy behind Breathe.  His captivating story of healing turned into a fascinating exploration of respiratory anatomy, evolutionary biology, and even theological insights on breathing that it made me forget all about my CE woes.

 

Halfway up the mountain, I found myself ordering his book on Amazon, convinced that immersing myself in this stuff would not only be good for me but also for the clients I serve.

Then reality hit harder than a rock in my hiking path: the last two hours of my life were incredibly enriching, but they didn’t count toward my CE credits. Seriously, how was this not a thing?

 

That’s when it hit me like a lightning bolt: if podcasts, audiobooks, and YouTube videos could rack up nursing CEs, I’d be crushing my 30-CE requirement every couple of weeks!

 

When I got home, I called my friend Antra and shared my epiphany, driven by the immediate need to fix this injustice. Nurses are constantly learning—at work, at play—because we’re total geeks. Yet every two years, we wait until the last minute to do the CE shuffle, dreading the outdated, boring content and inconvenient delivery methods. And if we want to enjoy our education, we have to pay a fortune to attend conferences. So, we hatched a plan to shake things up and make education as enjoyable as binge-watching your favorite show.

 

That’s how we birthed RNegade—where CE meets podcasts (or podclasses as we call them), and learning becomes a whole lot cooler. Welcome to the revolution!

And If You're Still Reading . . .

Check Out Our Core Values

  • FREAL

    Before RNegade was even an idea, I was on the phone with Karen DiMarco and we were talking about authenticity. We decided that the word “authentic” sucked. I mean, its meaning is great, but the word is so overused. We wanted a new word, so we made one up: FREAL (that is f***ing + REAL). FREAL is one of RNegade’s core values. As we started to build our team, FREAL was front and center. It means that you are true to yourself regardless of outside pressure to be otherwise. It is the freedom to be who you are in all your glory and not so glory. The RNegade team is as FREAL as they come.

  • Blow Up The Box

    FREAL is a RNegade core value. But wait… there's more! How about the cliche’ “Think outside the box”? Overused, right? And, I mean, it is good if you can think outside of the box. Definitely more room for the unknown. BUT- what if you could “Blow up boxes, instead of merely thinking outside them”??? When we put together our team, one of the first things we did was talk about RNegade’s core values. Of course, creativity and innovation was at the top of the list. The ability to try stuff that goes against the grain, doesn’t follow suit, and flips the paradigm upside down is WHY we blow boxes up! #blowupthebox because we don’t just think outside the box.

  • Allergy To Risk Aversion

    RNegade core value: What doI want to call this one??? Thinking… Early on the RNegade team talked, in depth, about the culture of our company. What did we want it to look like in the present moment, but also as we grew to be the number one educational platform in the country. What was super important to us was, as you know, FREAL ( F***ing + Real = FREAL), but also this: We wanted to actively seek out ways to jump into the unknown-- you know-- take risks. We didn’t want to be “risk averse”, rather we decided to be highly allergic to risk aversion. In other words, do it- see what happens. By extension, opportunities will avail themselves to us and we will continuously improve.

RNegade Founder

Karen DiMarco, or simply "RNegade," is a force of nature in the nursing world.

Senior Instructor & RNegade Podcast Host Karen DiMarco