by Joshua Franzel, PhD, president/CEO, Center for State and Local Government Excellence

Local governments, now more than ever, are looking for innovative ways to meet their service obligations while containing costs. At the same time, governments must become employers of choice to be able to compete for workforce talent – including local public health professionals with essential skill sets.

The Center for State and Local Government Excellence (slge.org) is undertaking research to analyze nontraditional, innovative approaches to acquiring expertise across local jurisdictions, focused on local health departments. SLGE is currently in the process of identifying local health departments that have established formal and informal arrangements with other local health departments to share public health personnel who hold needed skill sets.

If your government has established one of these arrangements or if you know of good examples outside of your jurisdiction, please email Joshua Franzel – jfranzel@slge.org at SLGE, by June 15, 2017. Once a diverse set of these arrangements is identified, SLGE will be developing a series of practitioner-oriented case studies with actionable conclusions and will distribute the research to the ICMA community.