CNA/NNOC installs new leadership as nurses gather in San Francisco
California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee has seated a new Council of Presidents for a three-year term running from 2026 to 2029, placing four veteran nurse leaders at the center of one of the country’s largest nursing unions. The transition took effect on Oct. 1, 2026, during the CNA/NNOC convention in San Francisco, where nearly 1,500 nurses from across the country convened.
The council sits above an elected Board of Directors and will help steer the organization through a period shaped by staffing pressure, corporate hospital consolidation, labor organizing in the South, and continuing fights over access to care. In practical terms, this leadership change matters not because it alters bedside protocols, but because union direction can influence how nurses advocate for safer staffing, preserve services, and respond when hospitals cut corners on care.
Four presidents now share that responsibility: Michelle Gutierrez Vo, RN; Marissa Lee, RN; Sandy Reding, RN; and Dolores Trujillo, RN. Each brings a different clinical setting and a different organizing history, yet all are tied to a common thread—nursing as both a profession and a vehicle for patient defense.
Veteran bedside nurses take the helm of a powerful labor organization
Michelle Gutierrez Vo, RN, enters a second term as CNA/NNOC president after nearly 30 years in nursing. She currently works at Kaiser Permanente Fremont Medical Center in an adult and family medicine clinic, a setting that depends on continuity, access, and patient trust. Her role in the union has also extended beyond California; she serves as a vice president of National Nurses United, CNA/NNOC’s national affiliate.
Her leadership reflects a model common in nursing labor politics: bedside experience paired with an insistence that clinical work cannot be separated from social conditions. Gutierrez Vo has framed the moment as one that calls for leaders willing to defend both nurses and the communities they serve. That argument resonates in a workforce still absorbing the consequences of chronic understaffing, moral injury, and the pressure to do more with less.
Marissa Lee, RN, works in labor and delivery at Osceola Hospital in Kissimmee, Florida, owned by HCA, the nation’s largest hospital system. She has become a prominent figure in Southern nurse organizing after helping unionize her own hospital’s nurses. Her clinical specialty gives her a direct view of how fragile maternity services can be when executives view them through a business lens rather than as essential infrastructure.
Childbirth units are especially vulnerable to shutdowns and service reductions because they are costly, highly specialized, and politically easy to sideline when margins tighten.
Labor and delivery, emergency response, and NICU care shape the council’s perspective
Lee’s presence on the council points to a larger strategic concern: labor and delivery services are often the first to feel the pressure when hospitals consolidate or trim line items. When a maternity unit closes, the impact is immediate and geographic, forcing pregnant patients to travel farther for care and increasing the chance that routine obstetric services become emergency transfers. Nurses working in those units often see the fallout before administrators do.
Sandy Reding, RN, brings nearly 40 years of nursing experience and currently works in the operating room at Bakersfield Memorial Hospital in Bakersfield, California. She has been a critic of the federal immigration crackdown and has emphasized that patient health does not stop at the hospital doors. Reding was first elected president of the union in 2020 and is beginning a third term in the CNA/NNOC council.
Her record also includes leadership of the Dignity Health Pandemic Task Force and work with the Registered Nurse Response Network, the union’s volunteer emergency and humanitarian relief project. In a profession shaped by disaster response, pandemic surges, and community instability, that background carries weight. Nurses in operating rooms and emergency relief settings know how quickly systems strain when the surrounding social environment destabilizes care.
Trujillo’s NICU background adds regulatory and bedside expertise
Dolores Trujillo, RN, works in the neonatal intensive care unit at Kaiser Roseville Medical Center in California and brings more than 25 years of nursing experience to her first term as CNA/NNOC president. She also previously served as president of the California Board of Registered Nursing, giving her direct exposure to the regulatory framework that shapes nursing practice in the state.
A NICU nurse’s perspective is especially consequential in union leadership because neonatal care is unforgiving of weak staffing, delayed interventions, or disorganized transitions. Caring for medically fragile newborns requires precision, vigilance, and rapid escalation when a patient’s condition changes. Trujillo has made clear that bedside accountability remains the core of that work, and her route from bedside practice to state-level oversight gives the council a leader fluent in both clinical realities and professional regulation.
Outgoing presidents leave behind a broad organizing legacy
The council transition also marks the departure of two outgoing presidents, Cathy Kennedy, RN, and Cokie Giles, RN, both of whom remain active in CNA/NNOC efforts. Kennedy, a nurse of more than 40 years who recently retired from a neonatal intensive care unit in Roseville, served two terms as CNA/NNOC president and became the first Black-Asian multiracial RN to hold the role. She will continue as a president of National Nurses United for another year.
Giles, the longest-serving president on the CNA/NNOC council, held the role since 2014 and recently retired from an interventional pain clinic. Her career has been closely tied to Maine labor organizing and the broader national movement for nurses’ rights. Both Kennedy and Giles remain aligned with campaigns for Medicare for All and organizing efforts in hospitals across the country.
The leadership change lands at a moment when nurse unions are trying to connect staffing, patient safety, immigration, reproductive health, and hospital ownership into one coherent public message. Nurses do not just lobby for wages and contracts; they also function as sentinels for service erosion, unsafe staffing, and the consequences of treating essential care as a commodity.
CNA/NNOC, the largest affiliate of National Nurses United, says it represents more than 100,000 registered nurses in California across more than 200 facilities and is part of a national union representing nearly 225,000 nurses. The new council inherits that scale, along with the expectation that nursing leadership will keep pushing on behalf of patients, hospitals, and the profession itself.