The Platform Evolved, Thanks to a Dedicated Nurse

January 15, 2009

Two of the things that really set the Miss America Pageant apart from other pageant systems are the talent competition and the requirement for each contestant to have a platform. I’d like to give you the background on this – tell you a bit about its history and what it means within the competition for the contestants. Sound good? Great! Let’s go!

The idea of the platform came about thanks to Miss America 1988, Kay Lani Rae Rafko.  Kay Lani was a registered nurse, and the country was in the midst of a nursing shortage during her reign. She decided to speak to students of all ages, nursing colleges, healthcare organizations -- pretty much anyone and everyone that she could talk to about her profession. Her dedication did not go unnoticed by the nursing industry. The American Nurses Association stated that she single-handedly improved the nursing shortage through the “power of the crown”. The Miss America Organization also took notice of her accomplishment and decided to implement a new requirement for all contestants to have a platform going forward.

A contestant’s platform can be any issue they want to support – abstinence, drug and alcohol education, AIDS research, support for homeless veterans, teen self-esteem, eating disorders – the list goes on. What do you DO with your platform, you might ask? Well, the short answer here is: Anything and everything. I was amazed to hear some of the contestants’ stories when I was at Miss America. You really need to come to Miss America ready, because my Miss America interview was 95 percent about my platform. 

You need to know your platform inside and out, be aware of the arguments against it, and be able to defend it. And perhaps most importantly, you need to have DONE something for it. It’s a bad idea to walk into a Miss America interview with “plans” to do things for your platform, but having done nothing about it. You need to be able to back up your words. In other words, be prepared to discuss the things you have already done.

And speaking of “doing” things, the Miss America Organization also gives a Quality of Life Award. This service-based award is another opportunity to award scholarship money to these incredible women for doing good, selfless things. And seriously, how cool is that?

The number of programs implemented, people educated, and dollars and awareness raised from the contestants in this program is mind boggling. Whatever your opinion about pageants, or pageant girls – there is still no contesting the incredible amount of “good” they have done.