Minneapolis Health Department Uses PHIG to Build a Pipeline of New Public Health Talent
Success StoriesThe Minneapolis Health Department is using the Public Health Infrastructure Grant (PHIG) to ensure programs across the entire department can host and pay interns. The department used PHIG funding to host three cohorts of interns via their centralized Public Health Pathways Internship program, giving supervisors who previously lacked the budget for interns the chance to bring them on and expand community-facing work. This is a critical investment as health departments nationwide work to replace the workforce they’ve lost post-COVID and bring in new skill sets to meet the evolving needs of their communities.
Giselle Martinez-Izea, Public Health Specialist at the Minneapolis Health Department, shares how the program has already made a real impact: interns leave with a deeper understanding of public health and a stronger interest in pursuing it as a career, and many come from outside the field entirely, bringing new perspectives and skills with them. The program is also giving staff valuable experience mentoring the next generation, while helping build a public health workforce that better reflects the communities they serve.
Video Transcript
The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
How has PHIG transformed your internship program?
With PHIG, we were able to get funding to pay interns at the Minneapolis Health Department. We’ve been able to host interns, expose them to public health, help them learn about public health, and give them community-engaged experience serving the residents of Minneapolis through their work at the Minneapolis Health Department.
After COVID, a lot of people have been leaving health departments, and that’s not just in Minneapolis, that’s in general across the country. A lot of people have been leaving the public health workforce. Bringing more youth and young adults into public health, in general, is incredibly important due to current circumstances, and it helps us reflect and serve a new generation.
What’s been the impact?
We’ve gathered a lot of data through focus groups and surveys from the beginning and end of each internship. Their data reflects that a lot of our interns, across the three cohorts we’ve hosted, have learned a lot more about public health than they had known previously to being a part of the internship, and they’re more interested in actually pursuing a career in public health prior to the beginning of the internship. A lot of the people that we bring in were not already in public health. We had an intern who, for example, was pursuing college for business and finance. We want to make sure we’re bringing in people that are interested in public health and giving them that opportunity to work in the field, even if they don’t have that specific experience but are interested in a career change.
This internship program has also been able to give a lot of people who aren’t necessarily considered supervisors the ability to get experience supervising some of the interns. And our existing supervisors get more experience with being able to host interns that are high school age, as well as college and graduate student age. So we’re giving our staff experience working with students, teaching them about public health, as well as, in general, giving them the experience of what it means to manage youth and young adults within the public health workforce.
What improvements have you seen in the department?
There were a lot of supervisors that had been saying that they didn’t have the capacity to participate in an internship program, that they would love to have an intern but they didn’t necessarily have the funding within their division or unit to pay for an intern. With the Public Health Pathways internship program, through the funding that we get through PHIG, we’re able to give supervisors an opportunity to bring on interns and enhance programs that are community-facing.
Why does it matter who enters public health?
Representation is incredibly important, especially in public health, because people want to see that representation and want to see people that look like them. When we’re bringing in people of different backgrounds, ages, that have different experiences, the next generation of public health workers see people that look like them and realize, “Oh, I can work here, too.” So that representation is very important in order to bring people into the public health workforce, so they don’t have that feeling of “I don’t belong,” because they might not see people that look like them, have those same experiences, et cetera. So increasing representation, in itself, helps us to bring in more people and create a more welcoming workforce for everyone in public health.