Why the New Jersey Dept. of Health is Investing in Grant Writing and Evaluation Training
Success Stories“We want to make sure that everybody has a skill set and that everybody is set up for success in their role — and that we’re able to retain the workforce.” —Omolola “Lola” Taiwo, Executive Director of Performance Management and Quality Improvement and PHIG Evaluator, New Jersey Department of Health
Grant writing and program evaluation are foundational capabilities for a public health department, not optional skills. Without them, departments can’t track progress, demonstrate impact, or secure funding to sustain or expand their work. Omolola “Lola” Taiwo, Executive Director of Performance Management and Quality Improvement at the New Jersey Department of Health, explains how her team is using the Public Health Infrastructure Grant (PHIG) to build foundational capabilities across the agency
Through PHIG, the New Jersey Department of Health is training staff to write grants independently and design effective program evaluations. Teams across the department are gaining the skills to track what they’re doing, assess whether it’s working, and demonstrate results. An initial pilot reached 40 staff members, with another cohort already underway.
The goal isn’t just competency. It’s preparedness. The pandemic revealed gaps in public health training, and demonstrated that a workforce stretched beyond its capacity can’t effectively serve the public. By investing in workforce development focused on core, cross-cutting skills, New Jersey is taking the time to cross-train staff, increasing their capacity to respond to whatever public health challenges or opportunities may be around the corner.
Video Transcript
The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
What has PHIG meant to New Jersey?
This is really a one-of-a-kind grant that is enabling us to expand how we do our work and ensure that our staff really have the capacity to do that work. It’s helping us make data-driven decisions in a way that we’ve never had a chance to do before. So it is revolutionizing the way that we do our work.
How have you used PHIG funding?
It really goes across the gamut. We are doing a lot of workforce development – really making sure that we understand the staffing gaps, making sure that we are expanding offices that need to be expanded, ensuring that we can improve the way our residents have access to services and expanding that. We’re working on improving health literacy, program evaluation, quality improvement, improving the ways in which we collect data and improving interoperability across different data sets. It is quite a wide-ranging grant which is helping us touch multiple facets of our department.
What kind of initiatives are you prioritizing?
We’re building out trainings for our staff to be able to write grants on their own or within their team and to be able to design program evaluation, understanding that program evaluation is a key component of the program planning. We need them to be able to accurately track what it is that they’re doing and make sure that it is actually working for the intended audience, then they need to be able to tell a story at the end of the program to say, “this is what we did and this is how we did it.” Our original pilot had about 40 people, and so we’re doing another pilot in about two weeks for our grant writing courses. We’re really at the space where we’re resetting and making sure that we have a 24-month plan for the remainder of the grant. It is hitting the ground running at this point, but we’re excited to see the impact.
Why is workforce training important?
Preparedness is really key. We don’t know what’s around the corner, right? We didn’t know the pandemic was coming. We don’t know what might happen in the next couple of weeks, days, months, or years. And so, at the end of the day, we want to make sure that everybody has a skill set and that everybody is set up for success in their role, and that we’re able to retain the workforce. I think a large part of the burnout due to the pandemic was just that everybody was doing a lot, and they didn’t have the resources or the capacity to do that. We really want to make sure that all of our staff have the skills, the resources, and the capabilities to do their job to the best of their ability.