How Have You Been Able to Use PHIG Funding?

I mean, this is unprecedented funding in that it’s focused on workforce development, it’s focused on
strengthening foundational capabilities in public health. And coming out of the pandemic, we learned a
lot, a lot of successes and a lot of challenges that really focused on how we need to strengthen the work
that we do to address the inequities in health throughout our community and to be able to, with a laser
focus, try to address them.

So we have focused, in terms of workforce development, on addressing retention, hiring, and filling
vacancies because folks don’t want to do two jobs or three jobs – they need to do their job and they need to be able to be surrounded by colleagues who are committed to the vision that we have to make
San Francisco the healthiest place on earth.

Why Is Relactionship-Building So Important?

The pandemic was an incredible stressor for our workforce, like it was a stressor for all workforces and
public health workforces across the country and around the world, quite frankly. What we knew is that
as we were coming out of the public health emergency, we were hiring a number of new staff. A lot of
staff didn’t really have an opportunity to get to know each other in their new roles, not just the roles
they were in when they were deployed for the public health emergency.

So with that, we needed to come up with a mechanism to have teams be able to work together, to build
trust, to build cohesiveness. Rather than coming up with the top-down approach, we created a mini-
grant program called the Boost Awards to boost trust, to boost relationships, to boost productivity.

The idea here is that we give small mini-grants, anywhere from $100 to $5,000. We have a call for
applications every two months, and then teams put together their proposals and they work in
collaboration with their directors. Those proposals can focus on a wide range of things. We’ve received
proposals to pull together communications workshops, we had a team that wanted to do a ceramics
class together so they can get to know each other better.

So we’re very excited. We’ve granted over twenty Boost awards to date since the beginning of 2024, and
our early evaluations have shown us that people really value the opportunity to come up with these
ideas. These are frontline staff who are generating these proposals – what a wonderful workforce
development opportunity for them to build skills to be able to seek future advancement opportunities.
And we’re really excited about this innovative program!

What’s Next?

We’re still in our early implementation of the Boost Awards, and as I mentioned, we’ve funded over
twenty applications to date and we’re receiving applications every two months. So as part of our
targeted evaluation plan, we want to know what the perceived value of the Boost Award program was
for the applicants, for the teams that are participating in the activities supported by the Boost Awards,
and then ultimately, is this having an impact on retention? Are people feeling like: “this is a place that I
want to work, and I want to stay here working to support the work of the San Francisco Department of
Public Health”?

And so we’ll have some early reads on those evaluation data in 2025, and we hope to disseminate those
learnings to the public health field so that they can replicate this model if we find that it’s effective.