This transcript was automatically generated and may contain inaccuracies; please refer to the original recording for confirmation. 

MONA POBLETE: 

Hi, everyone. Happy Tuesday. We’re really excited to have you here today. My name is Mona Poblete. I’m a senior analyst on the performance improvement team at ASTHO.  

I’m also joined by some other colleagues: Kristen Sullivan, who is our director and also Jillian Bajema, who’s our director of engagement.  

Today, we’ll be going over implementing PHIG workplans through cross cutting teams, and we have our special guests, the Alabama Department of Public Health (ADPH), coming in to talk about their experience.  

We’d love to get to know you. So if you would like, please introduce yourself in the chat. You can state your name, your position, as well as your health department.  

Just some housekeeping rules to increase engagement, we do encourage you to keep your camera on, but if you need to step away or having some bandwidth problems, we understand if you have to keep your camera off. Keep your mic muted when not speaking. We also have a raise hand feature to ask a question, or if you have any other questions, you can place it in the chat.  

We will have time after the presentation to go over any Q&A’s that you have. And lastly, to enable closed captioning, you can click on the CC button on your zoom task bar. 

KRISTIN SULLIVAN:  

The idea for this call came about last summer at a national meeting of PHIG grantees and peer networks, where we heard that the new investment in infrastructure is a welcome opportunity, but is also presenting challenges to agency workflows and understanding the big picture of this work.  

Leaders told us there’s a need for teams to work across programmatic and administrative areas, and even beyond to external administrative agencies in order to implement those plans effectively.  

So today, we’d like to spend this time sharing and discussing effective agency systems and communication for advancing PHIG work plan goals that require executive support, hiring, and expending funds.  

A team from Alabama is going to lead us off sharing the good work and progress they’re making through use of cross cutting teams and collaboration, and in the spirit of peer to peer, sharing and learning, we encourage you to participate during the discussion portion, ask questions, share some of the strategies that you’re currently using, and it’s great to hear about both your successes and your challenges.  

Before we get going, we’re going to run a few Slido polls just to get a sense from the group where you are with utilizing cross cutting teams and collaboration. So you can go ahead and start those polls. 

And if folks could join those polls. The first question is, are you currently working as part of a cross-cutting team in your agency to implement PHIG work plans?  

So it looks like we have more than half of folks on the call that are participating are working as part of a cross cutting team. That’s great to hear.  

We can go to the next poll. What area do you collaborate the most with when implementing PHIG work plans that could be an administrative area, a programmatic area, or both? A business office, data modernization, budget and fiscal. Love it. Admin, workforce development, data modernization is big. HR, very big. Makes sense. Contracts, people working on getting those funds out the door, systems, development, local health administration, strategy, communications, and someone says it varies. Great. Next poll.  

In three words or less. What successes are you experiencing in collaborating as a cross-cutting team? A variety of perspectives. Excellent trust. I love that. Cohesion, alignment, performance management, improved partnership, ideas, broader reach, coordinating efforts, interests and engagement, critical conversations. That’s really important. And trust is coming up big. That’s great. Thank you. Thank you for that. Those are all really important questions, and it sort of helps us to give a baseline for our upcoming presenters. 

In three words or less, what challenges are you experiencing in collaborating as a cross cutting team? Lack of time, lack of engagement, bandwidth. Time management, territorial teams, disparate vision, meeting priorities, naysayers, siloed work.  

These are all challenges that I’m sure are being experienced across many, many jurisdictions, and it’s one of the reasons why we’re having calls like this, is so we have the opportunities to sort of surface some of those successes and challenges across peers to help everyone learn. Staffing shortages, understanding the full picture. Okay, great. Thank you very much. Do we have one more? I think we close those out right? 

MONA POBLETE:   

We have a wonderful panel for you all today from the Alabama Department of Public Health, who volunteered to present how they’re working as a cross cutting team on PHIG workplans.  

First, we have Shaundra Morris, she’s the chief accountant and director of the Financial Services Bureau. We have Brent Hatcher, the Director of the Office of Human Resources, Kenneth Harrison, the Director of Workforce Development, Jacob Cannon, the state intern for the Office of Human Resources. And lastly, Dyan Hunter who is a PHIG Grants Manager, welcome guys, and I’ll turn it to you. Thank you so much. 

SHAUNDRA MORRIS:   

Okay, thank you all so much. I’m Shaundra Morris, the chief accountant and Director of Financial Services. As we begin our presentation, I want to take this opportunity to thank ASTHO for welcoming us to do this presentation.  

We’re very excited to share our cross-cutting teams experience. I also want to mention Dr. Scott Harris, who may be on this call, he’s our state health officer, as well as Catherine Donald, who’s our chief financial officer. And I’m going to turn it over now to Brent Hatcher. 

BRENT HATCHER: 

Good afternoon. You know, it’s interesting. We here, we are talking about collaboration. We have this nice collaboration of folks talking to you this brief presentation.  

Again, I’m the HR director here. We really work as a department to accomplish our mission, and that mission is to promote, protect and improve Alabama’s health, and then and then, our vision is healthy people, healthy communities, healthy Alabama.  

And we really, we really do appreciate the funds that we’ve gotten from this PHIG grant because the department really works to accomplish our mission in two ways.  

One, we provide caring, quality services through our county health departments. Again, we preserve and protect the health of Alabamians in a lot of ways. And as many of y’all know, it’s not directly observable and you’re all aware of those.  

These activities, just to give you a little bit of the structure in Alabama, we have 67 counties in Alabama, and we are largely centralized, and we’re broken up into eight public health districts. So, 65 of those counties are in six of those districts. And then we have Mobile County, which is in its own district, and then Jefferson County, which incorporates Birmingham, is the other one. So, you know, with 2700 employees, there’s a lot of and so if you all know it’s a lot of work to cut, a lot of collaboration that is needed.  

We were accredited by the Public Health Accreditation Board in 2017 and then reaccredited here recently. Just to brag, we’re going to put a little brag in here. We do rank as the 23rd best employer in the state of Alabama by Forbes, so we try to slip that in any and every chance we get. 

And as you all know, we have some protective services. Here’s a list of those things. And then we also have our clinic services that a lot of y’all have.  

And then, just to see, just a picture, so you can see how we’re broken up. I know you’re not going to be able to read this, but at least you can see the colors. These are the different counties that fall into each of our districts.  

We, the central office is in Montgomery, which the Montgomery County Health Department falls in the east central district. So, we are here in the capital in Montgomery.  

In 2019, our five-year strategic plans that we’re now in the fifth year of that plan, included workforce development as one of those. So, this really was a nice this, this grant coming in really is helpful, in part, helping us with our strategic plan.  

Some of the other things that we have in that is our health outcome, improvement, financial stability, organizational adaptability and data driven decision making. So again, we’re really happy about this grant because it’s helping us target areas that were already part of our strategic plan. So, popcorn over to Ken, alright? 

KEN HARRISON:  

Thank you very much. My name is Ken Harrison. I’m the Director of Workforce Development for the Alabama Department of Public Health, and about four weeks ago, I had the privilege to address and present to the Alabama State Legislature, the house labor shortage committee. And they were they were interested in the shortfalls and the different challenges that the employers in the state of Alabama are facing.  

And so, I was able to talk to them about some of the challenges that we face, but most importantly, what we’re doing to overcome some of those challenges.  

And very first thing that I mentioned was that we applied for the Public Health Infrastructure Grant. And, by doing so, and once we were awarded, that allowed us to help better develop our workforce. And you know, by several means which many of you are familiar with, obviously, for recruiting and hiring staff.  

It allowed for us to hire multiple staff, including our grant manager, grant evaluator, our recruiters, which I’ll spend a moment talking about them. It also helped us build our training to help make sure that the workforce with Alabama Department of Public Health is in a better position to serve the people of Alabama.  

We also are currently increasing our foundational capabilities, which is strengthening our processes, our systems, and also to strengthen our DMI capabilities, but expanded a little bit about our recruiters. That’s the position that’s near and dear to my heart.  

We, as Brent mentioned, with ADPH, we have six districts that each one of them have about, or made up about 11 counties, and each district, through the PHIG, we were able to fund a district recruiter and their response.  

They’re responsible for, not only recruiting, recruiting qualified candidates, but also going out and collaborating with the universities, with all the academic institution, with the high schools, with the local community-based organizations, and developing that relationship and using opportunities speaking engagements to educate, you know, all the way.  

I know that we had one that was educating sixth graders the other day, but educating people on public health. A lot of people don’t understand what all we do with public health. But educating them, educating the first-year college student that has yet to decide what they want to follow as a career path, and just really educating them, helping them learn how to fill out applications, how to apply for a job with the state of Alabama, which is a lot different than applying in the private sector.  

There’s different steps they have to take, but it’s really a lot about educating and they’ve done we’ve already hired three. We have three more to go. We’re on the verge of hiring a fourth one, and we’re just really excited about this position and what they can do to help us build those pipelines at the various classifications.  

Our recruiters work hand in hand with our communication department, in particular, our digital media division. And if there is a certain need and a certain geographical territory of their district, maybe in southwest Alabama there’s a low talent pool for environmentalists.  

Well, they’re able to work with our social media division, and they can target blogs, they can target different social media that Nextdoor, Facebook, YouTube, whatever social media they’re wanting to target. They can target and we can provide blogs. We can provide links to apply for a job. So, we’ve seen a lot of collaboration between our recruiters and our communications department.  

Also, as Brent mentioned, we use every opportunity we get to talk about Forbes when I’m addressing the Alabama State Legislature. I obviously had to throw that in there as well, that we were ranked the 23 best place to work in the state of Alabama, and very, very proud of that.  

But I want to take a couple moments to talk about some other areas that we’ve seen increased collaboration and communication within the department as a result of the public health infrastructure grant.  

The first is when we built our target our targeted evaluation plan. And our first tip, we chose the used for recruiting and hiring process, which, uh, and we’re going to continue this throughout the life of the grant, all the way through November of 2027 but in this, you know, the very first thing that we did was identify the stakeholders who’s going to help us through this process.  

And of course, we included our recruiters, Office of Human Resources, our financial services office, our employee relations, our communications department, among a couple others. And we’ve seen a lot of collaborations there.  

We’ve already had our initial meeting where we were brainstorming, you know, what are the questions we’re going to ask ourselves as a department to help us grow in these areas? What are indicators? What are the means of survey, of collecting data, and then what are we going to do with that data?  

So, we started out with our brainstorming. We came up with those, and we we’re going to be meeting quarterly all the way throughout the process or the life of the grant.  

Another area that we’ve seen quite a bit of collaboration with the grant. We have 22 different programs, and each program wrote their own activities, their milestones, their targets, and they’re all funded in some way where there’s contractual or hiring or retention, whatever strategy A1, A2, or A3.  

We have 22 different programs, and each month we have a monthly meeting with our Project Officer Molly McKenna, which is awesome to work with. She’s shares a lot of resources with us.  

It’s been very, very helpful, very easy to reach out to and very accessible to everybody, but with our monthly meetings, our project our program managers, were able to share, you know, what successes they’re having, what challenges they might see, and we’re able to talk about that as a group.  

We’ve also in our most recent project officer (PO) monthly meeting, Molly was able to bring in our Grants Management Specialist Dawn Amaker who was able to explain the carryover of funding and our expanded authority and our program leads were able to ask questions at that point in the upcoming January meeting of Christina Chung, which is the PHIG lead evaluator is going to be joining us, and again, our program leads are going to be able to seek guidance through Christina and you know, help us work together to form our performance measures as well as our evaluation measures.  

As far as the office that we’re housed in. My office is housed in the Office of Human Resources.  

From the very beginning, the collaboration between our department and the financial services has been, since day one, since the first day we got the NOFO and reading this together, helping understand the NOFO to going through our budget narratives, our project narratives, developing our performance measures, developing our attempts, developing our non-competing continuation. It’s just been a constant collaboration.  

I would say that Shaundra and I meet probably at least a couple times a week, sometimes two times a day. So, we’re in constant collaboration. But it shares it with the whole department.  

When I say Shaundra and I meet, we have several people in her department, several people in our human resource department, have quite a bit of collaboration.  

The last part that I want to touch on here is our TA, our technical assistance, we’ve been very happy with the TA response that we’ve got. I think we’ve applied for about 15 to 18 different TA requests and anywhere from helping us to identify job descriptions, interview questions for various positions, to being able to collaborate with the peers.  

I know that when we were at the reverse site meeting, one of the speakers mentioned from California that they were converting 40% of their interns to full time employees, and that really piqued our interest, and we did a TA request for that as a result.  

ASTHO actually organized three different virtual meetings that helped us with understand meeting with California and being able to pick their brains for what they were doing to be successful in those programs. So, we’ve seen quite a bit of collaboration and communication. It’s really helped bring us together and share our ideas with each other. 

SHAUNDRA MORRIS:   

Alright, thank you, Ken. And As Ken mentioned, we also, like we said, from the beginning, financial services has been involved in the PHIG grant.  

Like we said, once he received a Notice of Funding Opportunity, he immediately reached out to not only financial services, but several programs to discuss the Notice of Funding Opportunity. From there, financial services also worked along with him and other programs regarding the application process, the budget process, the narratives and work plans.  

Of course, we also developed the Chart of Accounts and funding codes. We work hand in hand with developing performance measures. HR, normally is not involved as one of our programmatic areas. It actually houses a lot of grants in that area. So this is definitely a learning experience. So that’s why a lot of times, me and Ken meet quite often, along with other staff members.  

I also work with him with entering information into PHIVE we had various brainstorming sessions and meetings. We have monthly set meetings. So that helps with what I saw. A lot of people talk about the time management issue of being able to meet. We have a standard set meeting that we meet every month with our project officer.  

I also was got involved with the selection of job classifications. As we know you had to have a full-time evaluator on this position of workforce development director, grant manager. So we work together hand in hand to come up with some of those job classifications and the duties for that also on what I serve as one of the project leads, because we also have some financial systems that we’re trying to update.  

We will work with the subgrantee process as well making sure they submit their invoices that they’re going through their grant monitoring as well as grant drawdowns and FFRs that’s housed in the area of financial services.  

We also help with the evaluation plan, coming up with all three evaluation methods and areas. And we also participate in the TA requests, site visits. I met the project officer in Chicago at the PHIG Reverse Site visit. I wasn’t a part of that, but I was at the ASTHO meeting. We were able to eat breakfast and communicate as well on the PHIG grant.  

And then, of course, financial services serves as a customer service liaison. For grant funding, I’ll turn it over quickly to Dyan. It starts at the program level, and then it works its way up to financial services. 

DYAN HUNTER: 

Yeah, I was very thankful to get the opportunity to be the grant management for this. And first thing that I did, luckily, the project director, Ken, had very good organizational skills, and we came together and decided to do binders, which I think has been a very, very big, helpful opportunity for us to not only meet face to face with each project lead and give them something that they can tangibly hold, that would help with record keeping, make it easier when federal audit process comes around.  

But it’s even more than that, because we stepped into working with IT, working in a way that we can do folder sharing that gives them the opportunity to look and see what the ledger breakdown I have and compare it with their own, and just make sure that we are, you know, on the same page when it comes to spending.  

Working hand in hand with finance to make sure that we have, you know, the Chart of Accounts correct, the funding and spending is being done correctly.  

And so it’s just been a great opportunity to work across the different departments. And we have, like you said, like 25 different department leads that have a line item out of it. So this is something that’s very important to be able to communicate with them on a regular basis. 

SHAUNDRA MORRIS:   

And then we know we’re short for time, so we’ll try to wrap it up. For some of the grant funding, like we said, we were to complete the drawdowns the FFR. We provide training.  

We’re going to participate in monitoring and site visits and audits, and of course, we’ll provide monthly portal and yearly reports, other reports this is that are needed.  

One thing that we do want to talk about is with the Workforce Development Grant. We were thinking about setting up a centralized Grants Administration Office. We plan to continue that with PHIG funding.  

We plan to try to fund up the city eight staff members. We worked across the board with finance HR and other state agencies to look at the subject matter experts ASTHO senior leader reserve corps has sent us a proposal to help set up this particular office.  

And we also have some big TA requests as well. And like we said, we work hand in hand with HR from our Office program integrity standpoint and our program grant managers.  

A few of the systems that we’re going to implement, from financial systems standpoint, or financial services standpoint, is we’re coming up with an out of state travel electronic system, and we’re going to use the travel P card. Some of the state agencies already utilize this program. So we’re going to use PHIG to implement this granting for the health department to hopefully increase the timeliness of processing our state travel requests. 

We’re going to set up an electronic cost adjustment system, which goes hand in hand with indirect costs, trying to make sure that we have after we’re counting those records.  

We’re also looking at a comprehensive grant management database that will be used by decentralized grant offices and everyone in the department.  

We’re looking into a file repository sharing system so we can get out of the process of actually receiving manual invoices through the mail. And then we’re also looking at electronic requisition system, whereby all of our requisitions will be from beginning to end, sent through an electronic process and signed over.  

And then lastly, we’ll incorporate our Office of programming integrity, which is our internal audit system. You’re going to convert several of their forms over to electronic process. And I think we’re down to maybe delays, but we’re right at three o’clock.  

So Kristin, do we need to turn it back over to you all? 

KRISTIN SULLIVAN:   

No, please go ahead and take another three to four minutes and finish up. You only have a few more slides I see, so please go ahead. 

JACOB CANNON:  

The grant has really been the work that we’ve had at CDC, that they recommend require is really structured, to motivate us to work, enter between teams, and to assess our success with these methods, they require two target evaluation plans.  

However, after the beginning, the early stages of planning, and even before that, we essentially committed to performing three over the course.  

The first that we’re doing, though, is based on recruitment and hiring, because we have approximately 2700 people who work in the Alabama Department of Public Health, but we also have over 500 open positions at any given time, some of which are actively being filled or looking for opportunities to fill. Some are not. So it’s a very important topic for us.  

And, this project alone, just creating this evaluation plan was enough to spur much of the inter team cooperation that we are seeing now, and much of that is because of the way that PHIG has been structured.  

So it’s required collaboration between offices within our department, coordination of data sharing. It’s helped us plan to encompass various topics through the course of future personnel retention and training workforce evaluation plans, and it’s led to our it’s led us to plan to hire a full-time evaluator, essentially working one of the motivating factors of expanding our team to assess something that we often deal with, which is health, public health related grants.  

So it’s an important aspect of our project, certainly, and a way that PHIG has helped us motivate to work more collaboratively. 

BRENT HATCHER:   

One of the challenges we have, and some of y’all probably do as well as we have to utilize another state agency, our state personnel department, in terms of positions and classifications and salaries, studies and things like that. 

But we really have done a, I think, we’ve done a really good job of working with them, explaining to them what it is that we are doing, and they’ve actually stepped up to help us with salary surveys, scoring applications quick, a little bit faster than normal. As well as they’ve actually helped us, they increased our entire pay plan by four steps, which is 10% so, you know, it’s a step.  

I wish we could do more, but we are. They’re also creating new classifications for us and and they also use our staff here at Alabama Department of Public Health as subject matter experts, even for classifications that that a lot of agencies use. So we’ve been able to do some collaboration outside of the department as well. 

KEN HARRISON:   

Yeah, back in September, we had our site visit for reaccreditation, and now we’re in the planning stages for the next five years, and we’re unit we’re going to be using PHIG funding to be able to purchase new software to help us manage that re accreditation process, to see us through those next phase. 

SHAUNDRA MORRIS: 

And just to wrap up, we want to discuss some of the successes and challenges we had. Some successes like we said, working with our PHIG project officer. She is wonderful. She’s been there from the beginning, guiding us alone and working with Grants Managment Specialist, collaboration with different stakeholders.  

Like we said, from the beginning, we identified who those stakeholders were, and it just wasn’t our internal staff members, but our external partners as well, created, you know, the positions as required that were included in the PHIG grant, working with state personnel, as Brent just discussed, trying to bring down some of those past barriers we often encounter.  

Also, we were chosen as one of the states for procurement timeless project. So we worked with Christian, a lot of those ASTHO team members on that pilot project.  

Also, some quick responses to the TA request, like Kim mentioned, we’ve already submitted in the teams of those, and we’ve got responses back coordination to meet the deadlines like we say.  

We send out the deadlines in advance. We all work as a group, and we make sure that we work together to put everything into five to meet the deadlines. And of course, our social media expansion and our monthly set meetings.  

Some of the challenges that I’m sure everyone is having, is to hiring, recruiting. A lot of times it’s just the lack of qualified candidates.  

Spending PHIG year one monies, and that was mainly because a lot of our grant was going to be to retain a lot of the positions that we have created on the ELC and workforce development grant. And those particular grants continue to be extended, so that means we didn’t use a lot of our year one monies, but we went back to the drawing table and decided work with our project officer to see how we can re budget those funding and get expanded authority, also performance measures, including the procurement timeliness.  

I know that’s going to be a challenge, because a lot of us don’t have systems that actually where we can actually electronically get a lot of that data, so we’re still having some manual processes, and that was the reason why we are creating a lot of financial systems to be able to produce this information more readily.  

Also, we have ongoing coordination with state personnel. We don’t really see this as a challenge, but more or less as an opportunity. And then, of course, the development of new systems because of the manpower or the vendors that we’re utilizing, they have limited staff as well. 

BRENT HATCHER: 

I think we’ll probably forego the videos, but if you guys could, could go to YouTube, you can go to ADPH, and take a look at the Alabama Silent Guardians of Health.  

These are videos that that we’ve used, and our recruiters use these a good bit. And one of them is short, about 30 seconds and the other one is about five and a half minutes.  

And so, if you have chance, just take a look at those. We’re really proud. And those are all those are real ADPH employees on there, not actors. It was a lot of fun for them. I think that’s all we had to present. Now we just time for Q&A. 

MONA POBLETE:   

Thank you guys so much for presenting it. That was great. We’ll take this time and open it for Q&A. So if you have any questions, you can raise your hand if you’d like to come off mute, we have some questions in the chat. You can also ask it in the chat. Or if you don’t have any questions, we’d love to hear what you’re doing. And if you would like to share any ways you have a cross cutting team working on these PHIG work plans.  

So, the first question, just to clarify how big is ADPH? 

BRENT HATCHER:  

We have about 2700 merit employees. And again, we cover all of the state, which is 67 counties. 

MONA POBLETE:   

Another question we had is ADPH centralized system and our local departments part of ADPH? 

BRENT HATCHER:  

So we are a centralized department, mobile in Jefferson County, which is Birmingham. Those two are individual. They they’re independent now, they still pretty much answered to the state health officer or follow his guidance, I should say. But yes, and we also work with them and have for this grant as well.  

KRISTIN SULLIVAN:   

I did have another question in the chat, how did you start working together? 

SHAUNDRA MORRIS: 

It was a simple phone call, really. Once we got the NOFO, we read through it. Ken sent it out via email to different bureau directors, and we all looked through it, and we got together, and we sent him what we thought would help on the different program areas that we were over.  

And then Ken called me, and we just started collaborating together. And then we just had willingness to work together. And then we started seeing that we need to bring other people in as well, other Bureau chief’s, other program managers. And we just started collaborating,  

KEN HARRISON: 

Including the distribution of funding, it kind of helps we’re all in the same building. 

KRISTIN SULLIVAN:   

So just a simple phone call, no big strategy session or anything. Phone call, everyone doesn’t cost a dime, I don’t think.  

SHAUNDRA MORRIS: 

Then I see a question that says, Does the Office of Finance work with other grants? Yes, we do.  

Our financial services works with all the programs, with all of the particular grants that we have. So we have our actual section called grants and contracts that manages a lot of the grants in a alignment with the different program areas.  

I think, like we said, with the PHIG grant, we’re more hand in hand with them, because they normally are not a program that normally has an actual grant in their in human resources.  

So that’s why, with Ken being the Workforce Development Director, this is really the first time that HR has had their own individual grant that we’re saying now it’s like a program. So, we’re working hand in hand to make sure that he’s aware of all of the different things that’s required for from a grants and contracts perspective. 

BRENT HATCHER:  

I see the, what no meeting before the meeting? I’m pretty sure the call was help. 

MONA POBLETE:   

There’s another question in the chat, did you use a specific HR software to update your electronic system? 

BRENT HATCHER:  

No, we didn’t. That was easy. 

KRISTIN SULLIVAN:   

There’s another question right above it, does the Office of Finance, work with other grants? 

SHAUNDRA MORRIS: 

Yes, that was the question. Yeah, I did answer. We do work with other grants. Like we said, all of the grants, workforce development, ELC, COVID and non-COVID related grants, they all go through the Financial Services Bureau. Yeah, over 64% of our funds are federally funded. 

MONA POBLETE:   

How many staff support the finance functions, and how many staff handle contracts, and how many HR staff are there? 

BRENT HATCHER:  

So one I want to say I see Dr Harris is on in the chat. So, I appreciate that. Dr Harris, we have, we currently have 16 employees in the HR office, so we don’t have very many. 

SHAUNDRA MORRIS: 

And finance has about 35 including interns as well. And how many handled our actual contracts. We have a staff, about eight people, rents and contracts. 

MONA POBLETE:   

What has been your biggest challenge to date? 

SHAUNDRA MORRIS: 

Be biggest challenge to date. Probably just spending the funding right now because, like we said, we did have to go back and revamp our plan. A lot of our strategy A1 was to retain a lot of the staff. So that was really the bulk of that particular strategy was funded for the retention of employees. And now, like we said, with the ELC grant being extended, maybe the workforce development, we had to go back to the drawing board to see what else, how else we could use those particular funds. 

KEN HARRISON: 

And also, in addition to that, with our a lot of the initial challenges and ongoing challenges, we’ve been able to submit TA requests, and they’ve been very helpful in helping us, you know, find direction and also resources. 

SHAUNDRA MORRIS: 

Of course, going, you know, into PHIVE, we had a lot of questions, but we went through the various training sessions, and like we said, we had our project officer who assisted us as well, and we did some TA requests with that as well.  

And then the performance measures that was now that was very challenging, because, like we said, some of our systems are manual, so we had to find some type of innovative way to capture all of the data to be able to report it. 

MONA POBLETE:   

I think that’s all the time we have for questions. Thank you all so much for asking some in the chat with that, I’m going to turn it to Kristen to go over some next steps. 

KRISTIN SULLIVAN:   

So we just want to make you aware of some upcoming calls that you can take advantage of. Procurement timeliness lessons from Pilot jurisdictions is being held tomorrow at 3:30. 

There’s a couple of other upcoming calls after you get back from the holiday break, so be sure to register for those as well “Trusting Local Knowledge: Strategies to Strengthen Local Capacity for Community Health Improvement” and “Employing an Equity Impact Assessment in Decision-Making.” That’s on the 30th of January, but certainly be on the lookout for more calls.  

It’s really important that we share people’s stories and the lessons that they’re learning as they go through implementing PHIG grants and workplans. So there’ll be plenty more of these resources.  

We’ll be sure to get out a link to the recording for this call, and I’ll also include the slides so you can look for that. I think that’ll be coming out in the next PHIG connection newsletter, and I understand that will be coming out December 20, so the link should be in there for those that weren’t able to attend today. 

I think this was a really great call. I just want to thank all of our wonderful presenters, everyone that contributed to the call.  

A couple of important things that I heard to really include the CFOs and the financial leaders up front in the planning for the grant that seems to be critical. And there’s this collaboration between the recruiters and the comms department, daily connections between finance and human resources units. Those are all really good sort of strategies that you could consider as you move forward.  

If we could go to the next slide. I’m going to give you the evaluation, and if you wouldn’t mind just taking a couple of minutes to complete the evaluation. This is data and information that we report back to our funders, so we definitely appreciate if you take this evaluation and give us some feedback. We’re always looking to improve the calls as well. You can either use the QR code on your phone, or, I believe they’re putting that Bitly link right in the chat. You can access that as well. So, we’ll give you a couple minutes to do that. 

And so, we’d like to thank you all for joining the call today. Please feel free to stay on as long as you like to complete the evaluation. Thanks again to our wonderful presenters. We can’t thank you enough. Alabama team. We really appreciate the work you put into this. And people, please, if you have time, go to that link to the video that they shared. They were recognized in Forbes as a great employer. I think that’s absolutely fantastic.  

We really appreciate you guys coming and sharing all those you know, all the great work you’re doing.