This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

What was the situation in Nashville?

I work in our main office in Nashville. We have five branch offices scattered throughout Metro Davidson County, where we provide services for people, but our main campus is the Lentz building. It’s a building that’s about 16 years old, and it has never been updated since it was originally built. So it had fairly outdated audiovisual equipment and public space usage equipment.

How have you been able to use PHIG funding?

At a Nashville Strong Babies 20-year anniversary meeting, where our mayor, Freddie O’Connell, was presenting an award to the Nashville Strong Babies Group, he was at one end of the conference room, and I was standing at the other end, and we could not hear him. The audiovisual equipment wasn’t working. The overhead projector died in the middle of his presentation. And I said, “Okay, I have PHIG funding. I have A2 foundational capabilities funding – I’m going to update these conference rooms.” So now, we’ve updated the three conference rooms and now successfully used them.

What is this space typically used for?

The centennial conference room spaces at our main Lentz building are used annually by about 400 different groups, for either their quarterly meetings, their monthly meetings, OR their biweekly meetings, depending on the group and how frequently they meet. And that comprises about a total of 18,000 people who use these three different conference rooms, or WebEx, for meetings now. I think the audience is probably a lot larger than 18,000 now that we have full WebEx capability, and people can broadcast their meetings to members who are not able to attend in person.

It’s made the rooms a lot more user-friendly, a lot more useful. We’ve had our behavioral health summit held there twice now, where we bring in all of the surrounding communities around the Metro Davidson County area that are participating in our behavioral health and violence response units to meet in small groups because we can break the conference room into three areas. So we tend to break it into three separate groups and have different discussions, like domestic violence in one, mental health in another one, and mental health awareness in the last one. So those rooms can be broken up and used by the same group in different ways.

The other advantage for the space is, quite honestly, since the PHIG grant, it is also inward-facing on workforce development: small team events, large team events, individual bureau division, and program events where they didn’t have somewhere before that they could meet and engage. Or even if we’re in five different buildings around the city of Nashville, we could have all the teams connected through WebEx and participating at the same time in an event,

Why is this space so important?

With the Behavioral Health group, for example, we could only reach people who could come to us. And by having it available and by having full WebEx capability, we were able to broadcast the Behavioral Wellness Summit to probably an audience of close to 20,000 people over the three days of the behavioral health summit. They could log in as they wanted to attend different sessions or see different speakers. Normally, that summit has an attendance of about 2,000 people over the three days, and we’ve had to hold it in different venues, but by having it available online, we were able to also bring in speakers who couldn’t travel to Nashville. They could participate in the WebEx and offer guidance, expertise, and even first-case scenarios of what other jurisdictions are doing around behavioral health and wellness.

I’m fairly new to public health, but looking at the two years I’ve been there, I haven’t seen any other opportunities or grants like the PHIG Grant, which are directly aimed at improving how we engage our workforce, but also, more importantly, investing in the infrastructure.