Academic Health Department Webinar Series

Some answers have been edited for clarity.

BRIAN LENTES:
Today, we'll be learning about exploring successful Academic Health Department (AHD) partnerships across our different organizations and communities. Thank you very much for joining us. We are joined by many different speakers and are grateful for the great partnership with the Public Health Foundation. ASTHO is especially thankful to the Public Health Foundation and today’s speakers for joining us to deliver an introduction to Academic Health Department partnerships and to share the story of developing a successful model that works collaboratively to advance education, workforce, and health improvement.

We're also excited to have a captioner joining us today, instead of using Zoom's automatic options. However, you will still be able to access captions as you normally would — simply turn on your closed captioning and they will appear.

I'd like to introduce our speakers today.

We are joined by Kathleen Amos, who serves as the Director of Academic/Practice Linkages for the Public Health Foundation. In this role, she supports collaborative workforce development initiatives, providing capacity-building assistance for health departments, academic institutions, and other population health organizations across the country.

We’re also joined by Dr. Kimberly Giardina, Deputy Chief Administrative Officer for the San Diego County Health and Human Services Agency. Dr. Giardina holds a Doctor of Social Work from the University of Southern California and a Master of Social Work from San Diego State University. She was appointed to lead the HHSA in 2024 after more than 24 years with the County of San Diego. Dr. Giardina holds leadership positions in several key initiatives, including Co-Chair for the Live Well Center for Innovation and Leadership with San Diego State University, and Co-Chair of the San Diego County Substance Use and Overdose Prevention Task Force.

We’ll also hear from Dr. Amy Bonomi, Dean of the College of Health and Human Services and Professor in the School of Public Health. She is an internationally known domestic violence researcher. Dr. Bonomi earned her bachelor’s degree in Applied Psychology from Loyola University of Chicago, and her MPH and PhD in Health Services from the University of Washington, Seattle. Across her career as an administrator and faculty member, Dr. Bonomi has led strategic initiatives at the college and university levels to support collaboration among faculty and community partners, advance student success and career outcomes, and strengthen the resiliency of historically underserved communities.

Finally, we’ll be joined by Dr. Nicole Magnuson, Director of the Live Well Center for Innovation and Leadership — an innovative academic-practice partnership between San Diego State University and the County of San Diego Health and Human Services Agency. Dr. Magnuson is responsible for leading the strategic direction of LWCIL in pursuit of its mission to strengthen the partnership between academia and health and human services practice through the integration of education, research, workforce development, and service that advances equity in San Diego.

We’re very excited to have all of our speakers here today and are again very thankful for PHF’s partnership in this work. I’ll go ahead and pass this over to PHF. Thank you.

KATHLEEN AMOS:
Thanks so much, Brian. Am I able to control my own slides? There we go—perfect. Awesome.

Thank you so much, everyone, for joining us today, and thank you for this opportunity to speak with you about Academic Health Department partnerships. I wanted to take just a moment to introduce two groups that are really relevant to this work.

The first is the Public Health Foundation (PHF), where I work. PHF is a national nonprofit organization that serves the public health workforce by providing resources and tools, training, and technical assistance in the areas of performance management, quality improvement, and workforce development.

The second group is the Council on Linkages Between Academia and Public Health Practice. This is a consensus-driven collaborative of national organizations engaged in public health. It exists to work on initiatives designed to benefit the workforce broadly. The Council currently brings together 23 member organizations, spanning a variety of professional groups within public health — including ATO, federal agencies, accrediting bodies for both health departments and academic public health, and the certifying body for public health professionals. PHF does not serve as a member of the Council but acts as the convener, providing funding and staff support to keep all activities going.

I’d like to begin our discussion about Academic Health Department — or AHD — partnerships. You’ll hear us refer to them as AHDs throughout the presentation. Let’s start with a definition.

Academic Health Department partnerships are, essentially, what they sound like: partnerships built between health departments and academic institutions. These partnerships are collaborative and mutually beneficial, designed to strengthen and formalize the collaboration between organizations. They can enhance public health education and training, research, and service delivery — strengthening both the current capacity and workforce of the organizations, as well as building for the future.

AHD partnerships can look quite different from one community to the next, and you’ll hear a great example today. That said, there are some basic characteristics we tend to associate with an AHD partnership.

A critical component of these partnerships is having at least one health department and one academic institution working together. As part of that collaboration, there may be some type of written agreement linking the organizations. They may work together to provide education and training to students and the current workforce, collaborate on joint research projects, or jointly deliver public health services. To support these efforts, partnerships may involve sharing personnel, funding, or other resources between the organizations.

There are many reasons organizations engage in these partnerships. We've listed a few of the more common ones. AHD partnerships can help organizations enhance their capacity and better address community health needs. Many of these partnerships involve student training through internships and practicum experiences, which provide students with more practice-based learning and better prepare them for jobs in health departments after graduation.

AHD partnerships can also support the recruitment of qualified personnel, particularly by creating a pathway from academia into governmental public health. They facilitate lifelong learning for both practitioners and faculty members and often support the development and use of research that is relevant to practice. These partnerships bring academic researchers closer to public health practice and tend to emphasize more community-based research activities.

They can also help maximize the use of limited resources and enhance an organization’s competitiveness for new funding. Additionally, they support meeting accreditation standards for both health departments and academic institutions. Ultimately, these partnerships help strengthen the public health system and improve the public’s health.

Many organizations see value in partnering this way. We know that collaboration between health departments and academic institutions is widespread. Both ATO and the National Association of County and City Health Officials collect data on this through their profile studies. These data show that the majority of state and local health departments work with academic institutions. In fact, 100% of state health departments report working on projects with academic institutions. Similarly, 89% of local health departments report working with colleges or universities in some way, with 64% having regular meetings, written agreements, or sharing personnel or resources — some of the hallmarks of more formal partnerships.

These partnerships can develop in different ways. We've put together a working model to describe how they often form. Typically, they develop in stages. For example, an academic program might need student placements for internships and reach out to a health department. As faculty and health department staff get to know each other, informal collaboration may begin. These informal relationships often lay the foundation for stronger, more formalized AHD partnerships, with the relationship growing more complex and comprehensive over time.

Even with this model of AHD partnership evolution, there are many variations. These partnerships are shaped by what works best for the organizations involved. Some AHD partnerships are structured as one-to-one relationships between two organizations, while others function as consortia or groups of organizations working together. Some are governed by advisory boards or committees that guide the group’s direction, while others are more organic and free-flowing. Some involve shared staff who work jointly in both organizations, while others have designated staff in each organization who coordinate activities together.

The partnerships can also include a wide range of partners. While the core always includes a health department and an academic institution, the academic partner does not have to be a school or program of public health. Some partnerships include a variety of academic partners, and others bring in external partners such as hospitals or medical centers.

AHD partnerships also vary in their level of formality. Some start off informally and remain that way, while others establish written agreements to formalize the relationship. These partnerships engage in a wide range of activities related to education and training, research, and service delivery.

Examples of these activities include student internships or practica, health department staff providing guest lectures in public health classes, and events like brown bags, seminars, and workshops that bring together practitioners and faculty. Other activities include allowing health department staff to audit university courses, providing technical assistance to address questions or solve problems, engaging in community-relevant research projects, and staffing public health programs or events — including surge support during emergencies.

These partnerships also enable health departments to access academic resources, such as university libraries, and to jointly apply for grants or other funding to support even more collaborative activities.

There’s also a lot to consider when deciding whether to develop a partnership. Partnerships obviously take time and effort, so it’s important to think through the purpose and what you hope to achieve. You’ll hear more about this in the example from San Diego coming up, but some things to explore as you consider a partnership include the strengths and weaknesses of each potential partner organization—including your own. Consider what resources your organization has available, where there are gaps, and what needs a partnership might help fill. Also think about whether the potential partner organizations have resources that align well with your needs.

It’s helpful to assess whether the organizations involved have a prior relationship and how strong that relationship is, as well as whether there are champions within the organizations who can help move the partnership forward. Consider how much experience you and your organization have in developing partnerships, and whether the partnership will offer sufficient benefits for the investment it requires. Having a partnership is not an end in itself — you want it to help you accomplish something meaningful.

To support this kind of thinking, the Council on Linkages offers an Academic Health Department Learning Community. This community supports organizations working to develop and sustain AHD partnerships. It provides opportunities for people to connect, explore ideas, and learn from one another. The community is open to anyone interested and currently has around 1,400 members. It offers tools, resources, training, and technical assistance — all freely available.

This brings me to my last slide, which includes links to some of the resources we offer. These include the AHD Learning Community, archives of our AHD webinar series, and other tools related to AHD partnerships. PHF also offers more in-depth technical assistance for organizations interested in exploring or enhancing AHD partnership opportunities through our environmental scan service. Last fall, we released a book focused on developing and sustaining AHD partnerships, which is available for purchase.

With that, I’ll say thank you. Feel free to reach out to me at any time if you have questions or want to get connected with something. I’ll now turn things over to Kimberly.

KIMBERLY GIARDINA:
Thank you so much, Kathleen. I think that was a great summary. Good morning or good afternoon to everyone, depending on your time zone.

I want to start by thanking the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials and the Public Health Foundation for the opportunity to share about our academic-practice partnership with all of you. We’re excited about the work we’re doing in San Diego County, but we would be remiss if we didn’t recognize and thank the communities — probably many of you — who have been blazing the trail ahead of us. We’ve learned a lot and will continue to learn from all of you.

We’ve also learned that there is no perfect model for this work. I hope what we share today provides some inspiration and insight as you strive to create, improve, or reinvigorate what you’re doing in your local communities. We’re also appreciative of the leadership and support that both ASTHO and PHF are providing to us and to the nation in building academic health departments, advancing workforce development, and championing the public health field overall. That support feels especially critical at this time.

As the Deputy Chief Administrative Officer for the County of San Diego Health and Human Services Agency, and a long-term partner and alumna of San Diego State University, I’m grateful for the partnership we share. I appreciate Dean Bonomi’s and SDSU’s commitment to advancing education, workforce development, and health equity.

We thought it was important to begin by grounding you in our county landscape. San Diego County has nearly 3.3 million residents. We are a beautifully diverse border community with a majority-minority population. Our San Ysidro border is the busiest land border crossing in the United States. You can see how our size ranks within California and across the nation.

What makes our work complex is that we encompass 18 cities, 18 federally recognized tribal reservations—the most of any county in the United States—16 major military installations, and several unincorporated areas. The county is a mix of urban cities, coastlines, and rural communities. Even though most people think of our beaches when they think of San Diego, it is also one of the most expensive places to live in the nation. That means too many of our residents and families struggle to afford housing and meet their basic needs.

As a safety net provider, our Health and Human Services Agency—and the services we and our contracted providers offer—are critical to our vulnerable citizens. We serve as a lifeline for many residents.

Our Health and Human Services Agency is one of four groups in the County of San Diego’s organizational structure. Within the agency, we have seven service departments: Aging and Independence Services, Behavioral Health Services, Child and Family Well-Being, Housing and Community Development Services, Medical Care Services, Public Health Services, Strategy and Community Engagement, and Self-Sufficiency Services.

We moved to an integrated model in the late 1990s to improve service coordination and efficiency. We strive to operate as an “agency of one” so that we can be more effective as a person-centered government agency. This is always easier said than done, but we continue to strive for excellence in all that we do. We serve one in three county residents and have over 8,200 employees, making us a major health and human services provider and employer in our region.

We also contract with more than 350 community partners, extending our reach and impact within health and human services. As someone with more than two decades of service within our agency, I’m really proud of our commitment to student research, workforce development, and partnering with diverse communities.

Before we embarked on formalizing our academic-practice partnership, we recognized — similar to what Kathleen shared earlier — that we already had many partnerships and were functioning somewhat like an academic health department, but without much intention, coordination, or understanding of our impact. We had a long-standing commitment to student success, rigorous research, student and staff development, and to convening, collaborating, and providing backbone support to our local community.

Because this foundation already existed across many of our departments, the academic health department model appealed to us as a way to make our agency more efficient and effective. We also saw it as an opportunity to strengthen our existing academic partnership as a means of improving policy and practice, so we could have a greater impact on the field and the communities we serve.

Although conversations about formalizing our partnership began before COVID, we emerged from the pandemic with a reinvigorated commitment to collaboration. Following the academic health department model, we formalized our partnership in October 2022 with a public signing of an overarching memorandum of agreement. The signing included leadership from the County of San Diego, our Health and Human Services Agency, San Diego State University, and the College of Health and Human Services. This public signing launched the Live Well Center for Innovation and Leadership and set the stage for a more intentional and strategic collaboration.

As I transition the presentation to my colleague and co-chair, Dean Amy Bonomi, I want to express my gratitude for the passion and commitment she has brought to this partnership. Both of us are fairly new in our current positions, but we see the value and potential of what we can achieve together as we strive to contribute to a healthy, equitable, safe, and thriving San Diego region.

AMY BONOMI:
Thank you, Dr. Giardina. Your leadership has been equally inspiring, and I’m so appreciative to work with you. I also appreciate the opportunity to speak with all of you today.

I’m quickly approaching my one-year anniversary at San Diego State University, and I’m proud to give you some context on our university and college. The College of Health and Human Services, where I serve as dean, is one of eight colleges within SDSU. As an institution, we are a Hispanic-Serving Institution and an Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution. We recently became an R1 university, placing us in the top 5% of U.S. universities in terms of research funding and doctoral programs. We’re very proud of that designation.

We have a large number of students and faculty across six schools: Public Health, Social Work, Nursing, Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, Exercise and Nutritional Sciences, and Physical Therapy—which just became its own school this year. Because of the volume of students, the variety of schools, and our degree programs, we are a major workforce partner with the Health and Human Services Agency of San Diego County. In fact, 50% of HHSA’s leadership are SDSU graduates, including Kim herself, who is a graduate of our Social Work program.

Our faculty have collaborated with HHSA on research for decades, and many HHSA staff have served as faculty lecturers, guest speakers, and advisors within our college. We also rely heavily on HHSA for student field experiences, internships, research, and training opportunities. Because of the university-wide structure of our partnership, we have access to every college on SDSU’s campus, including Business, Sciences, and Education, to name a few.

One of our first priorities after formalizing the partnership with the memorandum of understanding was to create a strategic plan. The second was to hire a jointly funded position to help move the work forward strategically between SDSU and HHSA. As far as we know, we are one of the only communities in the country with a plan specifically focused on advancing an academic health and human services department. Most communities we spoke with had plans for their public health departments, but not for an academic health department.

Our strategic roadmap was developed over a six-month period with support from a task force and our steering committee, which Dr. Giardina mentioned earlier. The entire process was led by our jointly funded director, Dr. Nicole Magnuson, who you’ll hear from shortly. Nicole’s position is dedicated solely to the partnership and is jointly funded by SDSU and HHSA to help us advance strategically.

Our strategic roadmap was officially adopted by our steering committee in August 2024, and we are now focused on implementing the plan. The framework includes four strategic priorities, all centered on education, workforce development, and health equity. We do this work informed by data and collaboration, both within the partnership and with others in service to the community.

The four priority areas are: People Success, which focuses on ensuring the success of students, alumni, and workers entering the health and human services field; Research and Data Excellence, which aims to catalyze research that informs and improves academic policy and practice; Service to Community, which integrates academic practice and community engagement to advance health equity and reduce disparities; and Leadership and Sustainability, which is essential to ensuring the long-term success of the partnership by building a strong, impactful community of leaders.

We also have a steering committee co-chaired by Dr. Giardina and myself. We’ve established committees aligned with our strategic priorities — People Success, Research and Data Excellence, and Service to Community. Several subcommittees have already launched or will launch soon, and the workgroups are now developing their specific plans for 2025 and 2026.

Most of us are familiar with the Academic Health Department journey map shared by the Public Health Foundation. The visual you're seeing here is our version of tracking progress. You can see the bolded milestones at the top of each year, starting with exploratory discussions in 2020 and moving toward formalizing agreements and building and aligning capacity. This process takes time—four to five years in our case.

It’s important to note that during all this planning and implementation, we experienced leadership transitions twice within the Health and Human Services Agency of San Diego County, as well as leadership changes in the College of Health and Human Services at San Diego State University. In addition, like many of you, we’re navigating the impacts of the current political environment, including federal changes affecting research and workforce, and deep state-level budget cuts impacting both the university and HHSA. Our message, as Nicole will elaborate on shortly, is really about persistence and patience as we move through these unexpected challenges.

Now I’ll talk a bit about our journey and some highlights, thinking about both foundational work and how we’re advancing and sustaining the partnership. Foundational work includes all the steps we’ve taken to set a solid base for the partnership and its leadership moving forward. This includes engaging leadership, formalizing agreements, jointly funding dedicated capacity — such as Nicole’s position — and developing a specific strategic plan and roadmap to guide us.

We’ve also taken steps to advance the work. This includes expanding awareness and involvement of faculty, staff, and students across both organizations; creating action plans with clear, manageable goals and objectives; and identifying opportunities to lead and innovate. These opportunities include collaborating around regional workforce development and interprofessional education, and advocating for the public health field overall, which is something we’re actively engaged in now.

I’ll now turn it over to Dr. Nicole Magnuson to complete our presentation.

NICOLE MAGNUSON:
Good afternoon, and thank you so much for this opportunity. As you’ve just heard from Kim and Amy, I’m in a very fortunate position to be working with two amazing, visionary, and committed leaders, along with many others at the County of San Diego and San Diego State University.

In February, we held our annual steering committee advance. We call our retreats “advances” because we focus on moving forward rather than looking back. At the advance, we discussed our progress, upcoming priorities, and gathered input from the steering committee on the direction of key priorities emerging from the subcommittees. It was an energizing experience, and we truly appreciate the ongoing support from leadership within both the county and the College of Health and Human Services.

We wanted to share just a glimpse of the work that’s moving forward. Some of it is further along, while some is still emerging. This gives you a sense of the multiple activities we’re juggling.

First, the People Success Subcommittee is our longest-standing and most active group. It’s co-led by Jennifer Bransford-Koons, Director of Aging and Independence Services, and Dr. Jong-Won Min, Director of the School of Social Work. They’ve been working hard to advance their focus on student field experiences, attracting and retaining workforce talent, and recruiting SDSU students and alumni to pursue careers within HHSA. There’s also a future focus area we haven’t yet started—building connections with community college and high school students.

I’ll focus first on improving and expanding student field experiences. Much of this work highlights the need for systems change within both organizations. The effort is being led by an internal workgroup within the County’s Health and Human Services Agency. While HHSA already has student field experiences in place—mostly related to clinical placements and practicums, including a robust and coordinated management fellows program—there isn’t currently an infrastructure to support a coordinated non-clinical internship program across departments.

We’re now exploring what it would take to coordinate onboarding and support for students within the agency’s “agency of one” model. The goal is to pilot this with SDSU and set the agency up for greater success as it expands partnerships with other universities in this space.

The next area I wanted to share is our ongoing effort to recruit students and alumni into the agency from SDSU’s campus. We recently launched our inaugural Health and Human Services Careers Week. The key takeaway is that we offered a wide variety of opportunities through career fairs, workshops, and a special networking event to help students and alumni connect with the agency.

During that week, we helped students build job preparation skills such as interviewing, resume writing, and navigating the county’s application process — how to get on hiring lists and how to apply for positions. The highlight of the week was our “Meet the People” event, a networking opportunity for students, alumni, and county professionals. This event attracted 230 attendees. Kim Giardina was our keynote speaker, and we featured a panel of HHSA professionals — many of whom are SDSU alumni — who shared their career paths. Nearly 40 county professionals, many also SDSU alumni, attended and connected with students before, during, and after the event.

It was an amazing experience that energized not only the students and alumni but also the county professionals, who were excited to share their experiences and passion for their work.

I won’t go into all the numbers shown here, but the key point is that we made at least 675 connections with students and alumni. We tracked engagement across various events and also did tabling to showcase different schools within the College of Health and Human Services. While we didn’t capture exact numbers from the tabling, we know it helped us reach even more students. We used surveys at every event — from career fairs to workshops to the networking event — and the main feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Students felt they gained valuable information, made meaningful connections, and planned to use what they learned in their job searches.

Shifting gears, I want to take you into the Research and Data Excellence Subcommittee, which Amy mentioned earlier as part of our partnership structure. This subcommittee is co-chaired by Dr. Ankita Kadakia, Interim Public Health Officer at the County’s Health and Human Services Agency, and Dr. Corinne McDaniels Davidson from the School of Public Health and the Public Health Institute. They are providing outstanding leadership.

This subcommittee has launched four workgroups: Advancing Equity Research, Catalyzing Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing, Joint Research, and Policy and Practice. I’ll highlight the Advancing Equity Research workgroup, which, in just a few months, has already identified two focus areas — oral health and food insecurity — for collaborative research. That work is now moving forward with great momentum.

We’re also beta testing a virtual connection hub under the Catalyzing Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing workgroup. This hub will provide a virtual space for SDSU researchers and county practitioners to collaborate on research, share opportunities, support each other’s events, and even pitch new ideas—all within a shared online environment.

Each workgroup is co-led by representatives from both the county and SDSU, reflecting our model of shared leadership. Whether it’s the steering committee, subcommittees, or workgroups, there is equal representation across partners.

The last area I want to talk about is our Leadership and Sustainability priority. While we haven’t emphasized it as much, we believe it’s one of the things that makes our partnership unique. This area focuses specifically on building the structures, capacity, and resources needed to make the partnership long-lasting and sustainable.

We’re approaching this as an executive committee of the steering committee, since much of the foundational work—like drafting and hiring for the director position and deciding to create a joint strategic plan — has been led by the steering committee. Expanding this to include representatives from both organizations allows us to align capacity more effectively.

One great example is the county assigning management fellows to support the partnership. In addition to my role, we now have a couple of management fellows working with me to help lead the work forward. Of course, we’re also looking to diversify our resources and support by seeking grant opportunities. We’re working on further integrating and cascading the partnership into both organizations. While there’s strong understanding and support at the leadership level, we want to ensure that people throughout both organizations are aware of and involved in the work. That means putting consistent communication in place and leveraging leadership voices.

As Dr. Bonomi mentioned, in our current environment, our last steering committee meeting focused on how we can use this partnership in a meaningful way to support the public health field. We’re also looking for opportunities to innovate within this space.

In wrapping up, we’ve definitely learned a lot and continue to learn, and we’re happy to share those lessons with all of you. Throughout the presentation, we’ve emphasized the importance of involved and engaged leadership. As you’ve seen through Dr. Bonomi and Dr. Giardina, we’re fortunate to have two leaders deeply committed to this work.

Prioritizing planning and infrastructure was one of the best decisions our group made. We committed early on to laying a strong foundation so that we could all succeed. Investing in and aligning capacity was another key step — jointly funding a dedicated position and aligning existing resources, like the management fellows, to support the work. We’re now exploring graduate and doctoral opportunities at the university to further strengthen this alignment.

Clear communication about needs and available resources is critical between the two partners and must be ongoing. Strategic integration into both organizations is also essential. We’ve had shared positions and placements before, but now we’re asking how we can do that more intentionally.

One guiding principle I’ve kept with me since the beginning of this work is something I wrote on a sticky note: “Start small, be strategic, then grow.” It continues to remind me that we can begin with focused efforts and build from there, as long as we approach it with a strategic mindset.

For communities smaller than San Diego, my encouragement is this: it doesn’t have to be a massive undertaking. Start with a small research or community project. This kind of partnership can be done in any community, regardless of size. Don’t let limited resources hold you back — you likely have more than you think. With that, I want to thank everyone. On behalf of Dr. Giardina, Dean Bonomi, and myself, we appreciate the opportunity to share the amazing work our leaders and community are doing through our academic health department. We look forward to answering your questions. Thank you again.

MAYELA ARANA:
Wonderful. Thank you so much to all our speakers for sharing your experiences, expertise, and insights.

We’ll now move into the Q&A portion. For those of you watching, please feel free to drop your questions into the Q&A box in your Zoom toolbar. To get us started, here’s a question: Where would you recommend a health department or academic institution begin if they’re interested in starting a partnership? Anyone feel free to jump in.

GIARDINA:
I can start, but others please chime in. I think the key is to start wherever you are. We say that a lot in many fields, but it’s especially true here. Each county, health department, and university is going to be in a different place. You may already have existing partnerships and collaborations — that’s a great place to begin. Ask how you can build on those, how you can be more deliberate and intentional about the work you’re already doing.

Building trust is also essential. That’s been one of the biggest factors in our success. Amy and I can have very honest conversations about what’s happening in our organizations, how that might impact our partnership, and how we can use the partnership to support each other through those challenges. That trust between organizational leaders is really important.

AMOS:
I absolutely agree. Communication and trust are key. Also, look for low-hanging fruit — things that are already in place or that you can build on. In terms of resources, the Academic Health Department Learning Community is a great place to explore what others are doing. It can help spark ideas and show you what’s possible.

We just dropped the link in the chat, but the learning community includes webinar archives where different organizations share how they started their AHD partnerships and what they’re working on. It’s a great resource if you’re thinking about what you might want to put in place. The community is open to anyone, and there are about 1,400 members. If you’re interested in joining, just let us know — send an email or drop a note in the Q&A. We also have a listserv where members can ask questions and learn from each other’s experiences, which I think is really valuable.

ARANA:
I’m going to try to combine two related questions. One asks what you did to increase awareness of the AHD among both institutions, and the other is about how you settled on your partnership branding, especially since many people aren’t familiar with AHDs.

MAGNUSON:
I can speak to part of that, but Kim, I think you’ll need to jump in too since you were there from the beginning. From what’s been shared with me, there was a recognition early on that the partners wanted this to be something owned by the community. The County of San Diego has a collective impact initiative called Live Well San Diego, so the decision was made to connect the AHD work to the Live Well brand and network. The idea was that we eventually want to bring in other partners from that network.

There was also a desire to establish the partnership in a way that would be sustainable and recognizable from a communications standpoint. We’ve done several things to support that. One is continuing to share updates within both organizations — what progress we’re making, where we’re going, and who we are. I’ve done presentations to faculty at different schools and recently presented to the executive leadership team within the County of San Diego Health and Human Services Agency. We’re always looking for opportunities to share the work and invite people into the space. We’re now entering the next phase, which is developing an ongoing communication plan to share progress and opportunities with both organizations.

GIARDINA:
Nicole said it beautifully. I’ll just add that Live Well San Diego has been a recognized brand across our Health and Human Services Agency and the county for about 12 years. We’re very close to having 600 formally recognized Live Well partners, so there’s a lot of room to expand this work through that network.

Another way we’ve built buy-in across both organizations is by expanding the steering committee and workgroups to include staff from multiple levels. It’s not just leadership contributing to the strategic plan and goals—our frontline staff are also involved. They’re able to say, “Here’s what we’re seeing,” and “Here’s how academia can help us.” Then they can take that back to their colleagues and say, “Look at this great thing we’re doing and how it’s working.”

BONOMI:
I’ll add a few specifics from the university side. Both HHSA and SDSU are large organizations — HHSA has over 8,000 employees, and our college has about 5,000 students and 300 faculty. So how do we keep this front and center?

One way is through consistent messaging. At every executive leadership team meeting — which includes all our school directors and key college leaders—we’ve made this a standing agenda item. But it’s not just a checkbox; we make sure there’s something meaningful to discuss about the partnership to keep people engaged.

Our joint steering committee has also been important for keeping us aligned and focused on our strategic priorities. And as Nicole mentioned, our Health and Human Services Careers Week was a signature event. Leading up to that, we did a lot of outreach — visiting classes, meeting with instructors, meeting with students, meeting with student organizations. As we did that, word began to spread about what we’re doing, how it impacts students, and what their return on investment is for engaging with the partnership.

This afternoon, I’ll be speaking with our College Council, which includes all our student leaders. We’ll continue the conversation beyond Health and Human Services Week to keep the momentum going.

ARANA:
Thank you. The next question asks if you can share a bit about challenges or successes in paving the way for staff who already work at the health department to complete internships or practicums at that same department.

GIARDINA:
Just to clarify, it sounds like the question is about people who already work at the public health department and want to complete their practicum there as part of their academic program. Is that correct?

ARANA:
Yes.

GIARDINA:
Yes, I think one of the key factors has been establishing agreements. Our public health department has had a longstanding agreement with SDSU’s School of Public Health around internships and practicum experiences. There are definitely challenges and successes. Both organizations have a lot of bureaucracy and rules, so we’ve had to navigate what needs to be included in those agreements and how to ensure we’re meeting the needs of both sides.

There are also accreditation standards and other requirements to consider. We’ve had to work through how to meet all of those, and again, it comes down to shared leadership. When we run into barriers or challenges, we’re able to talk through them together.

We’ve had a lot of success — not just in the public health department, but across multiple departments within our Health and Human Services Agency. Many of our staff have gone back to school to advance their careers, and we’ve been flexible and creative in supporting them. That way, we don’t lose valuable staff when they return to school; instead, we help them grow within their roles. So this kind of development is happening across the agency, not just in public health.

ARANA:
This will be our last question. It asks if you could say a bit more about your co-leadership model, and I’d like to add: what do you think is important for setting up boundary-spanning roles for success?

MAGNUSON:
I can speak to that, since I’m in a boundary-spanning role. First, regarding co-leadership: Amy and Kim, the heads of the two major organizations, co-lead the steering committee. Each subcommittee also has representation from both the university and the agency. We were intentional about having two leaders from each organization shape and guide the subcommittees. When we launched the workgroups within the subcommittees, we asked for co-leads from both organizations as well.

We’ve been very deliberate in ensuring both organizations are represented in setting priorities and moving the work forward. So much of this depends on the energy and expertise people bring into the space. For example, in the Advancing Equity Research workgroup, we had someone passionate about oral health, and we happened to have a chief dental officer in the county who shared that passion. That alignment allowed us to move the work forward. We also see this as a leadership development opportunity. Both partners are identifying people with leadership potential and giving them the chance to lead work that matters to the organization.

As for boundary-spanning, I’m still learning. My background isn’t in public health or academia, so I’m navigating two very different organizations with different cultures and rules of engagement. I try to enter both spaces respectfully, understanding how they work and how they influence or redirect resources. The integration of my position looks different in each organization. I’m invited and included in a lot at the leadership level, and I have access to directors who are willing to meet with me, strategize, and help troubleshoot. Carrie Rakatelli, Director of Strategy and Community Engagement, has been especially helpful in helping me understand and navigate HHSA.

It’s a learning experience. One thing I’ve realized is that there are real benefits to having a position anchored within the county. It gives me access to things that someone outside the system wouldn’t have. At times, I need to ask for help or leverage internal support to access certain spaces or resources.

ARANA:
Thank you so much. I’ll now turn it back to Brian to close us out. There are a few remaining questions in the Q&A — we’ll try to get some typed responses in before we wrap up.

LENTES:
Great, thank you all for speaking this afternoon. We’re glad to have learned so much about the Academic Health Department model. For all attendees, we welcome you to join future events. As PHF demonstrated, we have a collaborative that exists, and we invite you to be part of it. If you have further questions, please direct them to ASTHO. We’re always eager to learn about the opportunities you’re working on and the topics you’re developing. That helps us share best practices.

We also want to share a save-the-date for our next event in the series: “Pathways to Academic Health Department Partnerships,” which will take place on May 1st from 2 to 3 p.m. Eastern.

Thank you again for your participation this afternoon.

Some answers have been edited for clarity.

ANNA BRADLEY:
Hello everybody, and welcome. It’s so great watching everyone trickle in from the waiting room. We are so happy to have you here today.

My name is Anna Bradley, and I’m a Senior Analyst with the Performance Improvement Team at ASTHO. This is our second webinar in a series about Academic Health Departments. We are very thankful to the Public Health Foundation and today’s speakers for joining us to share their experiences developing Academic Health Department (AHD) partnerships.

Closed captioning is available today, and you’ll find the link in the chat. You can turn this feature on by selecting the “CC” button in your Zoom taskbar. Also, the webinar is being recorded and will be made available online following the event. Lastly, please type any questions into the Q&A box—we’ll have time for questions and answers at the end.

We have a slight change in our lineup of speakers today. Kathleen Amos is here but is losing her voice, so we’re grateful to her colleague Mayela Arana for stepping in. We wish Kathleen a speedy recovery.

Mayela is a Senior Program Manager for Workforce Development at the Public Health Foundation. In this role, she supports the development of workforce development resources, as well as the Council on Linkages Between Academia and Public Health Practice and its initiatives, including managing the Academic Health Department Learning Community.

Casie Higginbotham is the Academic Health Department Director for the Tennessee Department of Health. In this role, she works with faculty and students across the state of Tennessee to provide experiential learning opportunities and practical field experience. She serves as a connection point for faculty and career development staff in secondary and post-secondary institutions who want to partner with TDH, and she also works with external community partners to build a stronger public health workforce pipeline.

Jen Ricci has served as the Academic Health Department Lead at the Rhode Island Department of Health since 2019. In her role, she provides strategic oversight for public health education, research, and workforce development, fostering partnerships with colleges and universities statewide. Her commitment to expanding equitable access to internships stems from her own experience balancing unpaid internships with full-time work. She advocates for meaningful, supportive learning opportunities that foster career growth.

Lastly, but certainly not least, is Erika Gutiérrez Martínez. Erika serves as the Assistant Director for the City of Laredo Health Department. She has worked in public health administration for over 14 years, focusing on human resources, workforce development, fiscal management, and operations. She serves on various committees that promote workforce development and support for people with disabilities.

Mayela, I’ll turn it over to you.

MAYELA ARANA:
Great, thank you so much for the introduction and for the opportunity to speak with you today about AHD partnerships.

I’d like to begin with a quick introduction to two groups relevant to this work: the Public Health Foundation and the Council on Linkages. PHF is a national nonprofit organization that serves the public health workforce by providing resources and tools, training, and technical assistance in the areas of performance management, quality improvement, and workforce development.

As part of that workforce development umbrella, we convene the Council on Linkages Between Academia and Public Health Practice. The Council is a consensus-driven collaborative of national organizations engaged in public health that work on initiatives designed to benefit the workforce broadly. It brings together 23 member organizations, including ASTHO, federal agencies, accrediting bodies for both health departments and academic public health, and the certifying body for public health professionals. PHF serves as the convener and provides funding and staff support to keep the Council operating.

Now, I’d like to begin our discussion on Academic Health Department partnerships with a definition. AHD partnerships are collaborations between health departments and academic institutions. These partnerships are mutually beneficial relationships that strengthen and formalize collaboration.

They can enhance public health education and training, research, and service — strengthening the current capacity and workforce of the organizations involved and building for the future.

AHD partnerships can look quite different from one community to the next. There’s no single right way to develop a partnership, but there are some basic characteristics we typically associate with them. At a minimum, an AHD partnership includes at least one health department and one academic institution working together. Often, there is a written agreement linking the organizations.

Through the partnership, the organizations may collaborate to provide education and training to students and the current workforce. They may work together on joint research projects or jointly provide public health services. To support these efforts, the partnerships may involve sharing personnel, funding, or other resources.

There are many reasons organizations choose to engage in these partnerships. I’ll share some of the more common ones we hear from members of the AHD Learning Community.

AHD partnerships can help organizations enhance their capacity and better address community health needs. Many partnerships involve student training through internships and practicum experiences. These opportunities provide students with more practice-based experience, which helps better prepare them for jobs in health departments.

AHD partnerships can also be very helpful in recruiting qualified personnel, particularly by creating a pathway from academia into governmental public health. They also facilitate lifelong learning for both practitioners and faculty, and they support the development and use of research that is relevant to practice. These partnerships tend to bring academic researchers closer to public health practice and emphasize more community-based research activities.

They can also help maximize the use of limited resources and enhance an organization’s competitiveness for new funding. Additionally, they support meeting accreditation standards for both academic institutions and health departments. Ultimately, all of these benefits contribute to strengthening the public health system and improving the public’s health.

Many organizations see value in partnering this way. We know that collaboration between health departments and academic institutions is widespread. Based on data from ASTHO and NACCHO’s profile studies, 100% of state health departments report working on projects with academic institutions. Similarly, 89% of local health departments report working with colleges or universities in some way, and 64% have regular meetings, written agreements, or share personnel or resources — some of the key indicators of a more formal partnership.

So how do these types of partnerships develop? We’ve put together a working model to describe how AHD partnerships often form. Generally, they develop in stages. For example, an academic program may need student placements for internships and reach out to a health department. As faculty and health department staff get to know each other, informal collaboration may begin to emerge. These informal relationships often form the foundation for a more formal AHD partnership, with the relationship becoming more complex and comprehensive over time.

Even with this general model of evolution, there are many variations in how these partnerships take shape, depending on what works best for the organizations involved. Some AHD partnerships are structured as one-to-one relationships between two organizations, while others operate as consortia or groups of organizations working together. Some are governed by advisory boards or committees that steer the overall direction of the group, while others are more organic and free-flowing.

Some partnerships involve shared staff who work jointly in both organizations, while others have designated staff in each organization who coordinate activities together. These partnerships can also involve many different types of partners. While the core always includes a health department and an academic institution, the academic partner does not have to be a school or program of public health. Some partnerships include a wide array of academic partners, and others involve hospitals, medical centers, community colleges, or other institutions.

AHD partnerships also vary in their level of formality. Some are relatively informal, while others have written agreements in place to formalize the relationship. These partnerships engage in a wide range of activities related to education and training, research, and service delivery.

Examples of these activities include student internships or practica in health departments, health department staff providing guest lectures in public health classes, and events like brown bag talks, seminars, or workshops for both practitioners and faculty. Some partnerships allow health department staff to audit university courses, while others provide technical assistance to help address questions or solve problems. Many are jointly engaged in research projects that are relevant to the community, and others provide staffing for public health programs or community events. We’ve also seen partnerships provide surge support during emergencies, such as during COVID-19 and vaccination efforts.

Some partnerships enable health departments to access academic resources, such as university libraries, and others collaborate to apply for grants or other funding to support additional activities.

There’s a lot to consider when deciding whether to develop a partnership with another organization. These considerations include the strengths and weaknesses of each potential partner organization — including your own — what resources your organization has available, and where there may be gaps. It’s also important to assess whether the potential partner has resources that align well with your organization’s priorities, and whether there’s an existing relationship between the organizations and how strong that relationship is.

It’s also critical to consider whether there are champions within the organizations who can help move the partnership forward. You’ll want to think about your own experience — or your organization’s experience — with developing partnerships like this, and whether the benefits of the partnership will be sufficient to justify the investment of time and resources required to build and sustain it.

To help you as you think through these considerations, the Council on Linkages offers an Academic Health Department Learning Community. This community supports organizations working to develop and sustain AHD partnerships, providing a space for people to explore the idea and learn from one another.

The AHD Learning Community is open to anyone who is interested and currently includes around 1,400 members from across the country. It offers opportunities to connect with others, as well as access to tools, resources, training, and technical assistance — all of which are freely available.

Here are just a few of the resources we offer. In addition to the AHD Learning Community, we have archives of our AHD webinar series and other tools and resources related to AHD partnerships. The Public Health Foundation also offers more in-depth technical assistance for organizations interested in exploring or enhancing AHD partnership opportunities through our AHD Partnerships Environmental Scan service.

If you are a PHIG awardee, you can submit a request through ASTHO to receive this technical assistance from the Public Health Foundation at no cost. Last fall, we also released a book focused on developing and sustaining AHD partnerships, which is available for purchase.

I should note that we just launched our new website this morning, so if you come across any broken links while trying to access these resources, don’t worry — we’re working on it. Please feel free to email me directly, and I’ll make sure you get the resources you’re looking for.

With that, thank you again. Please feel free to reach out to me at any time. I’ll now turn things over to Casie to tell you more about what’s happening in Tennessee.

CASIE HIGGINBOTHAM:
Thanks, Mayela. Hi everyone, my name is Casie Higginbotham, and I’m honored to be part of today’s webinar. My presentation will focus mostly on the beginning stages of developing Academic Health Department partnerships, as our program in Tennessee is still very new. This will be a kind of “first year in review,” and I’ll be talking quickly to fit everything in.

My family travels to and through Atlanta pretty often, and while we love it there, we do not love the traffic. This image of a real interchange in Atlanta is what the Tennessee Department of Health felt like when I first started. We have about 4,000 staff across 22 divisions and offices, covering everything from the built environment to zoonotics and everything in between. I spent a lot of time in my first year learning about all the programs we offer and untangling everything in my own mind. I feel like I’m finally at a point where I understand all the lanes and where I fit in.

I also like to say that the separate lanes on the right side of the image represent the academic community in our state. I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out and navigating those lanes as well. Most importantly, I’ve learned that we’re all working toward the same mission: to protect, promote, and improve the health and well-being of all people in Tennessee. It’s been a real pleasure learning about the many ways we do that within the Department of Health.

To orient you to our governance structure here in Tennessee, TDH oversees 89 of the state’s 95 counties. The six lavender-colored counties on the map are our metro counties. The health departments in those metros each report to their own mayor or local board of health. The remaining 89 counties are divided into seven regions, with local health departments in each county reporting to their respective regional office. All of the regional offices report to the central office in Nashville, which is where my program is located.

Our program is very small. Starting the program was the brainchild of my supervisor, Joey King, who is the Director of Talent Management for the entire agency. He brought me on in June 2023, and we launched the program using workforce funding from the Public Health Emergency Preparedness (PHEP) grant and the Public Health Infrastructure Grant (PHIG). We also brought on Josh Woods in a part-time capacity while he was completing his MPH at Vanderbilt University, and we hired him full-time as a Workforce Specialist once he graduated. I should note that Josh started with TDH as an intern, and we’re very proud to now have him as a full-time member of our Academic Health Department.

When I came on board, TDH was already working with colleges and universities across the state—just not in a consistent or formalized way. We were involved in things like career fairs, guest lectures, one-on-one relationships with faculty at local universities, staff serving on curriculum committees, internships through our Public Health Training Center, students doing field collection for our state lab, faculty helping with data analysis, partnering on grants, medical resident rotations with Vanderbilt and Meharry, class participation in county CHIP processes, and staff serving as preceptors—or as I like to call them, cheerleaders—for our student interns.

It was important for me to find out who was already doing these things, and how and where they were happening. One of my first internal projects was a resource mapping survey using REDCap to learn about existing partnerships. I specifically wanted to know the TDH staff person and their division or office, the name of the school they were working with, the faculty contact, a description of the partnership, and whether a formal agreement was already in place.

Most of the 38 responses I received came from our central office staff, but even that relatively small number of responses yielded 112 different partnership descriptions. That gave me a solid picture of what our existing efforts looked like. It was incredibly helpful for me to understand these relationships—first, so I wasn’t trying to build new relationships where they already existed, and second, so I could come alongside existing partnerships rather than inserting myself into ongoing work without understanding the context.

Another important first step was finding the AHD Learning Community and specifically researching the types of Academic Health Departments around the country. The alphabetical list on the Public Health Foundation’s website was incredibly valuable in guiding me to AHD partnerships across the U.S. In some cases, I simply explored AHD websites to learn about their programs. In others, I reached out to staff for virtual meetings. I can honestly say that every time I’ve reached out to someone to discuss their AHD program, I’ve received a “yes.” People have been so generous in sharing their knowledge and best practices, and that’s been invaluable in helping me grow our Academic Health Department program.

As Mayela mentioned earlier, no two AHDs are exactly the same. The most basic model involves one public health entity formally partnering with one academic institution, often with a memorandum of understanding or affiliation agreement in place from the beginning. Our approach was to build a consortium-style model that included formal partnerships with all 11 schools in Tennessee that offer a public health degree of some kind. We had ad hoc agreements with many — if not all — of these schools at one time or another, but we wanted to establish formal AHD agreements with each institution and invite all of them to work not only with us, but also with each other.

Much of my first year was spent building relationships and goodwill with faculty at these 11 institutions. Early on, I learned during a meeting of the academic section of our state APHA affiliate, TPHA, that student involvement in our annual state conference had significantly declined — even before the COVID-19 pandemic. So we decided to invest funds into registration and lodging scholarships for 50 students to attend the 2023 conference. A requirement of the scholarship was to attend a TDH networking reception on the second evening of the conference. That reception was open to all student attendees, but scholarship recipients were required to attend.

We used a speed-dating format with about 25 of our staff, and student groups rotated from table to table to learn about each person’s role within the department and ask questions. It was such a hit with students and faculty that we expanded the program to offer 75 scholarships in 2024. Student attendance at the conference really exploded that year, and anecdotally, that seems largely due to the increased visibility provided by the scholarship program and the TDH networking night. We even had students attend the networking event who weren’t participating in any other part of the conference.

Much of the first year was also spent formalizing our internship program. This included developing a dedicated webpage for students to learn more about the program, creating a structured application and selection process, and adding a formal orientation and curated cohort experience. We also worked hard to align our application cycles with the deadlines of different academic programs across the state — again, doing everything we could to build goodwill and strengthen partnerships with our academic institutions.

We successfully onboarded and hosted 94 student interns during our first year. You can see the first three cohorts here, and as of this spring semester, we’ve hosted 141 total. Most of the students have been hired as contractors and are paid during their internships.

Our fellowship program existed prior to the creation of the Academic Health Department program, but we took over the fellowship and formalized the application, selection, and onboarding processes. We also provide ongoing support through bi-monthly meetings, professional guidance, and development opportunities. One of our fellows even served as a preceptor to multiple student interns, which has been a really exciting leadership opportunity for her — and fun for us to support and coach her through.

Another major focus of my first year was visiting universities across the state to talk about our internship and fellowship programs and to provide general education about public health career pathways and the services of the Department of Health. I believe these visits went a long way in building goodwill with faculty and creating strong, ongoing conversations with students. Many of them have stayed in touch with me through LinkedIn, email, and at conferences.

We also have an annual event at the Department of Health called the Central Office Road Show, where central office staff from Nashville travel to each of the seven regional offices to engage with regional and local staff and share updates. I attended all seven of those meetings in my first year, which gave me a valuable opportunity to connect with our own staff, educate them about what an AHD is, and let them know how they could get involved—specifically as preceptors for student interns.

One idea that came out of those engagements was to provide training for staff interested in becoming preceptors. Our PHEP and PHIG funds have also supported the creation of our own Tennessee affiliate of the CDC TRAIN learning platform. We’ve used TRAIN for interns, fellows, residents, and now for our preceptor training. Interested employees can access the training at any time to learn how to effectively host a student intern and hopefully feel more confident about becoming a preceptor. Increasing preceptorship among our staff has been one of our ongoing challenges, and this training is one way we’re working to address it.

Our first year culminated in the 2024 Academic Practice Linkages Symposium. We had faculty from nine of the eleven schools in Tennessee with public health programs attend the two-day conference to learn more about what an AHD is and how they could work with us through a formal agreement. Many of our own staff participated, including our TDH Commissioner, Dr. Ralph Alvarado, and our Deputy Commissioner for Population Health, Dr. Tobi Amosun. We were also joined by external partners, including Kathleen Amos from the Public Health Foundation and Mollie Mulvanity from CEPH.

One notable project that came out of the symposium was a request from the two HBCUs in attendance for more engagement with their students. This led to several in-person classroom visits and a career readiness seminar for students from both institutions. The seminar was facilitated in partnership between the Academic Health Department and our Office of Minority Health.

While it’s difficult to quantify how our early efforts are improving health in Tennessee, we do have some successes to share. We deployed our formal Academic Health Department agreement at the symposium last summer, and to date, eight of the eleven schools have fully executed agreements in place, with the remaining three in progress.

We’ve also established an Academic Health Department Advisory Committee. Among other responsibilities, this group works with us in a feedback loop on workforce development needs and training opportunities. Each of the eleven members also serves as a champion for our department and acts as the primary point of contact for communicating our initiatives to their peers and institutions.

We’re beginning to see the results of our first-year planning around scholarship programs for high school and college students. We recently awarded $20,000 in college scholarships to sixteen students who are members of HOSA — Health Occupation Students of America. These high school students are already interested in health-related careers, so we’re working closely with Tennessee HOSA to create exposure to and interest in public health careers.

This week, we’ll be notifying twenty community college students that they’ve each been awarded a $5,000 scholarship to help bridge them from their community college to a four-year institution, where they plan to complete a health-related bachelor’s degree. Students in Tennessee can attend community college for free, so we’ve partnered with the organization that manages that program to offer these scholarships to students completing their associate degrees this semester. Awardees will engage with us this summer to learn more about public health before receiving their scholarship funds in August.

Perhaps our most significant contribution to improving health in our state so far is that fourteen of our interns — from summer 2024 to the present — have been hired as full-time staff with the Tennessee Department of Health. These recent interns are now working at the local, regional, and central office levels in a variety of high-impact programs.

Lastly, our internship program is evolving to provide structured and transparent placement descriptions. This will support more advanced planning from preceptors and offer more tailored opportunities for students. Our Fall 2025 placement menu includes a range of opportunities, all aligned with our mission to protect, promote, and improve the health of all people in Tennessee.

That’s a quick look at our first year of building an Academic Health Department here in Tennessee. Thank you all for joining us today to learn more about these partnerships.

JENNIFER RICCI:
Hi everyone, and thank you for the opportunity to speak today. My name is Jennifer Ricci, and I’m from the Rhode Island Department of Health. I serve as our SC Scholar Program Manager.

The Rhode Island Department of Health — or RIDOH, as I’ll refer to us today — has a mission to prevent disease and to protect and promote the health and safety of the people of Rhode Island. We have three leading priorities: to address the socioeconomic and environmental determinants of health, eliminate health disparities and promote health equity, and ensure access to quality health services for all Rhode Islanders, including the state’s most vulnerable populations.

Before I jump into our program, there are a couple of things to keep in mind about Rhode Island. First, we are the smallest state in the country. To put that into perspective, you can fit over 220 Rhode Islands into Texas and over 400 into Alaska. We are very small and appropriately nicknamed the Ocean State, as 25% of our total area is occupied by water.

Despite our small size, Rhode Island is the second most densely populated state in the U.S., behind New Jersey. In fact, 77% of our population lives within 15 miles of our capital city, Providence.

Because we are so small, we do not have county governments. Instead, we have 39 local municipalities. As a result, we take a centralized approach to delivering public health services across the state.

For today’s conversation, it’s also helpful to know that Rhode Island has only eleven colleges and universities, and just three of those are public state institutions: the University of Rhode Island, Rhode Island College, and the Community College of Rhode Island, which has several locations throughout the state.

In 2015, our leadership identified a goal to enhance our efforts in establishing partnerships and collaborations with academic and research colleagues across the state. We wanted to build upon both internal and external partnerships to establish RIDOH’s culture of learning. Alongside our first accreditation, RIDOH’s Academic Health Department was created and renamed the RIDOH Academic Institute.

Our vision in the Academic Institute is to achieve excellence in public health policy and practice through academic collaborations, strategic planning, accreditation, performance improvement, and a multidisciplinary approach to public health in Rhode Island. Our mission is to strengthen the integration of scholarly activities within public health policy and practice by instilling a culture of learning that supports RIDOH’s leading priorities.

We have ten MOUs with schools in Rhode Island and several affiliation agreements with institutions both in and out of state. For today’s discussion, I’ll focus on our public institutions: the Community College of Rhode Island (CCRI), Rhode Island College (RIC), and the University of Rhode Island (URI).

As with many other institutions, all three of our state schools have high populations of students with financial need — 74%, 67%, and 84% of students at CCRI, RIC, and URI respectively receive federal financial aid. Additionally, both CCRI and RIC offer free tuition to qualifying Rhode Island residents who receive federal Pell Grants. That means 47% of eligible students at CCRI and RIC qualify for two years of free tuition. RIC is designated as a Minority Serving Institution, and both CCRI and RIC are designated Hispanic Serving Institutions.

This is a snapshot of enrollment trends from 2019 to 2023 for Rhode Island’s public institutions. To highlight the orange sections of the graph: each year, approximately 30% of students identify as Hispanic or as a race or ethnicity other than white. At CCRI, nearly 30% of students identify as Hispanic and another 22% as a race or ethnicity other than white. At RIC, over 25% of students identify as Hispanic and 17% as a race other than White.

This is an overview of Rhode Island’s Academic Health Department structure. It includes four centers: Public Health Education and Research (which is where most of my focus lies), Public Health Accreditation, Performance Improvement (both of which have expanded since we received PHIG funding), and Public Health and Healthcare External Workforce Development.

RIDOH’s Academic Institute officially turned 10 this year, which is exciting. We established the institute in 2015 and were accredited for the first time in 2016. That same year, we signed our first MOU with Brown University School of Public Health, which was our closest academic and research partner at the time.

In 2017, we launched the Public Health Scholar Program, our internship and experiential learning program. In 2018, we successfully hosted over 100 students for the first time, which was a major milestone. In 2019, the RIDOH Academic Institute received funding from our parent agency, the Executive Office of Health and Human Services, which allowed us to hire a Scholar Program Manager — a role I stepped into in late 2019.

I was hired in mid-October 2019, and I didn’t have much time in the role before the pandemic began. I was assigned to our COVID-19 response for nearly two years, so I didn’t fully return to this role until early to mid-2022. That said, we still made progress during those years. Even though the Public Health Scholar Program was on hiatus, we still hosted a number of students. We also signed our tenth MOU, hosted our first virtual symposium (which had previously been an in-person poster event), and launched our Public Health 101 weekly webinar series.

Rhode Island has seen several benefits from collaborating with academic partners. First, we’ve been able to drive innovation through research—improving data access and use, encouraging collaborative funding, and identifying new projects. Our main mechanism for this is the Public Health Academic and Research Group, which includes representatives from all of our institutions of higher education. This group is our primary way of identifying collaborations and projects with academic partners.

We’re also working to align education with practice needs — identifying workforce needs, aligning them with academic programming, and strengthening public health competencies in Rhode Island. For example, I sit on the MPH admissions committee for Johnson & Wales University, which launched a new MPH program last year. We also have a Student Placement Committee that brings together career staff and academic faculty to stay aligned, and we offer feedback on graduates, curriculum, and courses when requested.

We’re also strengthening public health excellence through our institutions of higher education. We convene quarterly meetings with health services directors across the state to provide updates on emerging public health topics related to college students. And we continue to offer hands-on experiential learning through our programs.

Finally, we’re working to empower RIDOH staff and build workforce capacity. Through the PHIG grant, we established our Office of Workforce Development and Employee Engagement. This office has collaborated with academic partners to bring training to our staff in areas like leadership, project management, interprofessional collaboration, and more.

All right, moving on. RIDOH has developed its own version of an academic calendar, offering several different opportunities throughout the year. One of our key events is the Scholar Project Symposium, which gives students the opportunity to showcase the projects they’ve completed at RIDOH. We offer this symposium three times a year — once each semester.

In preparation for the symposium, we also offer slide deck development sessions for participating students, and I’m always available for one-on-one support as needed.

As I mentioned earlier, we also launched our Public Health 101 webinar series. Each week, we highlight a different public health topic, and the responsible RIDOH program joins to discuss their work. Originally, this series was open only to RIDOH scholars, but we’ve since opened it to the entire state of Rhode Island, which is very exciting. Some of our academic partners are even considering using the recordings as extra credit or class assignments, which is great.

We also offer Public Health Out Loud Grand Rounds. My colleague Rachael Sardinha coordinates this external workforce development opportunity, which offers continuing education credits.

In addition to these programs, we have some new ideas in development. We’re looking to start a journal club, a book club, and an annual statewide event featuring various public health speakers.

Beyond the programs we offer at RIDOH, I also engage directly with students on campus. This includes attending career and internship fairs, participating in info sessions with different cohorts and major groups, and conducting informational interviews. I find these interviews to be one of the easiest and most effective ways to connect with students and help them see how their interests align with public health.

When I’m unable to conduct an interview myself — or if the student’s interest lies outside my area of expertise — I’m always happy to connect them with someone else in the department. We also offer shadowing opportunities for students, and we’re hoping to expand that in the future.

In addition to engaging with students, we collaborate directly with institutions of higher education. I’ve done guest lectures — typically a few each year — and we offer site visits and project-based learning opportunities within the classroom. For example, we’ve partnered with the University of Rhode Island’s Health Studies program to have RIDOH programs complete classroom projects, which has been a great experience.

We’re also working on career fact sheets to better support conversations with students, especially those majoring in non-traditional or emerging public health fields like engineering or data science. One of the biggest takeaways from engaging with students is realizing that we often speak very different languages. I’ve developed talking points based on students’ majors to help bridge that gap, connect their interests to public health, and help them understand how public health exists in the world around them.

This is an overview of our annual placement data for students in the Public Health Scholar Program. As you can see, the program was on hiatus from 2020 through the end of 2021 due to the COVID-19 response. What’s interesting is the trend we saw in 2021 and 2023.

In 2021, our placement numbers increased and came closer to pre-pandemic levels. But we saw a decline in 2022 and 2023. When we looked at the COVID-19 response timeline, we realized the increase in 2021 aligned with staff being stable in their COVID-19 roles, while the decrease in 2022 and 2023 aligned with staff transitioning back to their permanent roles. When there’s transition in the department, we tend to see a decrease in student engagement and mentorship opportunities.

That said, I’m hopeful that things will even out as we move into 2025. I’m excited to share that we’ve already hosted 52 students this year — and it’s only April. Last year, we hosted 62 students total, so we’re on track to exceed that.

We’re also making strong efforts to diversify the workforce, and we’re seeing that reflected in our 2023 and 2024 student demographics. We’ve seen a higher percentage of students identifying as Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, and Asian.

We’ve already seen some small returns on investment. We’ve hosted a total of 600 students who have completed experiential learning opportunities, and of those, we’ve hired or created contracting positions for over 10% in the last 10 years.

We’ve also successfully hosted 50 sessions of our Public Health 101 webinar series. We now have 20 formal academic partnerships through affiliation agreements, applied practice experiences, and newly added project labor agreements. These agreements are part of our effort to launch a residency rotation through the health department in partnership with our two local hospital systems — Rhode Island Hospital and Care New England (Kent Hospital).

Lastly, it’s exciting to note that 70% of our RIDOH scholars attend an AHD-affiliated school in Rhode Island. We’re working closely with our schools and their students, and we’re proud of the strong partnerships we’ve built.

That’s it from me. Feel free to email me if you have any questions. I’ll now hand things over to Erika.

ERIKA GUTIÉRREZ MARTÍNEZ:
Thank you, Jen. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Erika Gutiérrez Martínez, and I serve as the Assistant Director of the City of Laredo Public Health Department. I want to take a moment to thank the Public Health Foundation and ASTHO for the opportunity to share the work we’re doing here in Laredo.

A little bit about Laredo — we’re located in the great state of Texas, far from the 222 Rhode Islands Jen mentioned earlier. We are a border community, neighboring Mexico, with a population of about 260,000. Approximately 95% of our population is Hispanic. We are also the largest inland port in North America. Los Angeles briefly held that title, but we recently reclaimed it. We’re very proud of our culture, our dynamic community, and the unique public health challenges that come with being a border city.

Our vision at the Laredo Public Health Department is to provide the community with access to resources that support optimal quality of life, health, and well-being. Depending on funding fluctuations, we operate between 47 and 52 programs and services, with 250 to 300 full-time equivalent positions. About 78% of our funding comes from state, local, and federal grants, with the remainder supported by our local municipality. While we are a city-run health department, we also serve five surrounding counties in Webb County.

Looking at our employee demographics, we are predominantly female and Hispanic. Our staff’s age range varies, and most hold a bachelor’s degree, with a growing number pursuing or holding master’s and doctoral degrees. I like to highlight our employee tenure — most of our workforce has been with us for less than five years. Like many others, we’ve experienced significant turnover during and after COVID-19. We’re now seeing a new wave of public health practitioners, which makes it more important than ever to build strong education-to-workforce pipelines so we can recruit top talent.

Regarding our academic public health partnerships, we formalized our Academic Public Health Department designation with the Public Health Foundation in 2024. However, we’ve had both formal and informal agreements in place long before that. I can speak to partnerships that have been ongoing for more than a decade during my time here, and even longer with our flagship institution, the University of Texas.

Currently, we have over 30 agreements in place, ranging from local school districts to colleges and universities across Texas and beyond. We also work with vocational schools — such as those offering phlebotomy and medical assistant training — and with online programs, both in and out of state. These partnerships span from the bachelor’s level through medical residency programs. We host medical residents who complete a public health rotation as part of their degree requirements.

New linkages are often formed when schools or programs approach us directly, or through student referrals. Many students from Laredo study outside the city and want to return to complete their practicum or experiential learning requirements during the summer or their final semester. This also includes current staff who are pursuing degrees and need practicum placements — we coordinate those internally as well.

We have partnerships with major universities in Texas, including the University of Texas, Texas A&M, Baylor, Incarnate Word (which hosts a residency program), and Texas State. For the sake of time, I’ll focus on the University of Texas system.

The UT system includes 13 institutions, and we currently have agreements with about eight of them. We host students and interns year-round. A unique aspect of this relationship is the Education and Research Center at Laredo, which allows students to begin their degrees locally and complete them at other UT campuses. This gives us a unique advantage in promoting specific careers to local talent, who then go on to earn degrees from institutions like UT San Antonio, UT Rio Grande Valley, or UT Health Houston.

Current programs include public health, bioinformatics, licensed professional counseling, and social work. We also have a unique partnership in dentistry—UT provides dental services housed within our public health department.

Additionally, UT offers compensated programs led by the university system. One is the GET PHIT program — Gaining Equity in Training for Public Health Informatics and Technology. We’re now in our fourth year hosting students through this program, which includes stipends for participants.

We also recently became a site for the Home to Texas program. This initiative places students from UT Austin in local public health systems during the summer. These students also receive stipends for their work with us or with other city departments.

Here are just a few photos from our University of Texas programs. You can see our “Juntos for Better Health” initiative — this means “Together for Better Health” — which connects our community to mental health resources. We have licensed professional counselor and social work students participating in this program. You’ll also see our dental clinic staff outside our health department location, promoting the dental services they offer. And we’ve included a photo of some of our GET PHIT interns from previous years.

We also have strong partnerships with the Texas A&M University System, which includes a wide array of schools. We currently partner with the flagship campus in College Station, as well as campuses in Corpus Christi, San Antonio, and here in Laredo.

A unique advantage of the Laredo campus is that they launched their public health program in 2020. Since then, we’ve been able to host students at both the beginning and end of their academic journey. Early in their program, students complete approximately 80 hours with us to learn about public health. In their fourth year, they complete 160 hours and develop a program based on their experiential learning. It’s been a great partnership, and we’ve worked with students in nursing, social work, and — most recently — software engineering.

Texas A&M also offers compensated programs at no cost to our public health system. These include their Academic and Industry Readiness in Engineering and Science program, as well as federal work-study opportunities through student aid.

At Texas A&M International University, our local campus, we provide presentations to nursing students before they begin rotations in our various divisions. We also host public health students, and our newest partnership is with software engineering students. This has been a fantastic collaboration. An entire class—seven groups—has been working on software engineering projects related to public health. Over the course of the semester, they’ve learned about our infrastructure and developed solutions to real-world challenges. We’ll be presenting their final findings next week at Laredo Public Health, and we’ve invited both university faculty and public health practitioners to attend.

A few considerations for those interested in pursuing academic public health partnerships: start by evaluating your existing programs. Often, when we begin talking about formalizing an academic public health partnership, we realize that something is already happening in one of our divisions that could be formalized or expanded.

Leverage your current community partnerships. We do a lot of community outreach through public health, including hosting coalitions and committees. These relationships can easily grow into formal partnerships.

Definitely connect with the Public Health Foundation. I’ve learned so much from the resources they offer. Sometimes, it just takes that “aha” moment—realizing that another health department is doing similar work — and then formalizing or documenting your own efforts.

Highlight your successes and share your stories. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about the work we’re doing here in Laredo, especially with the support of the Public Health Infrastructure Grant. That funding allowed us to recruit a training specialist, Dr. Carla Alvarez, who is a subject matter expert in curriculum, instruction, and education. She’s helped us tremendously with both internal workforce development and our student programs.

We also have an administrative planner who supports all the behind-the-scenes work — getting MOUs, agreements, and affiliations formalized and organized. Thanks to their dedication and commitment to students and to Laredo Public Health, we’ve been able to flourish over the past few years.

The benefits of these partnerships are clear. They drive educational advancement, strengthen workforce development and capacity building — not just for current staff, but for future public health professionals. They also promote awareness of available services. Every time we talk to students, we’re not just introducing them to public health careers — we’re also helping them understand the wide array of services we offer. That knowledge stays with them, and they can share it with peers or family members who may need support.

Ultimately, these partnerships improve service delivery where gaps exist. Laredo is a medically underserved area, as designated by HRSA. Building capacity — especially in mental health, with licensed professional counselors and social workers, and in medical fields — is critical. We want to grow talent from within and recruit from flagship institutions across Texas to continue the important work we do in public health.

And that’s how we’ve continued to build our capacity. With that, thank you so much for your time. I know I had a limited amount of time, so I wanted to focus on the highlights of our program. This is what we’re doing at the local level.

ARANA:
Wonderful. Thank you so much to all of our speakers for sharing your experiences and examples with us today.

Now it’s time to answer questions from participants. Just a reminder — please enter your questions into the Q&A box in your Zoom toolbar, and we’ll read them from there.

The first question is for Casie: How did you find funding to pay the interns as contractors, and if it’s PHIG-funded, what are the plans for continuing this when PHIG ends and public health funding continues to decrease?

HIGGINBOTHAM:
Yes, that funding has come from both PHEP and PHIG. We knew from the beginning that the funding wouldn’t last forever, so we’ve already started transitioning our internship program to a partially paid, partially unpaid model. For fall 2025, we’ll have 11 paid positions with specific job descriptions that students can apply for. We’ll also maintain our traditional open-ended system, where students can apply to any two divisions they’re interested in. Those placements will be unpaid, and divisions can choose as few or as many interns as they’d like. That’s our plan moving forward as funding shifts.

ARANA:
Thank you, Casie. Jen, I think I saw you answer a similar question — would you like to chime in? And Erika, feel free to jump in as well.

RICCI:
Sure. In Rhode Island, all of our student funding currently comes from individual grants. If we haven’t included a line item for a student in a grant budget, then we don’t have funding to pay them — unless we find it elsewhere. I’m working on developing resources for our staff so we can begin including students and interns more consistently in our grant proposals. Right now, it’s about half and half — some paid, some unpaid — but we’re working toward a fully paid system.

GUTIÉRREZ MARTÍNEZ:
I have some limitations when it comes to paid internships due to our municipal infrastructure. We’ve had extensive conversations with our HR department and city management, and we’re slowly making progress toward having paid opportunities. Our biggest win so far has been the Home to Texas program. In other city departments, that program required a financial commitment from the city, but in public health, we applied for an additional scholarship through the university. That scholarship covers the full stipend for the student, so there’s no cost to us. We’re always looking for ways to integrate paid opportunities into our system, but we’ve been fortunate to participate in university-funded programs.

ARANA:
Great — thank you all so much. The next question is for Jen: How many FTEs support your work?

RICCI:
Pretty much everything I mentioned today is something I oversee and manage. The only exception is the Public Health Out Loud Grand Rounds, which is a monthly webinar series coordinated by my colleague Rachel. She’s also our Rhode Island TRAIN administrator, so she supports me with our public health courses on that platform. But otherwise, I’m the one and only. My manager and the director of the Academic Institute, Lori, started this work back in 2015. She brought two of us on in 2019, and we expanded again when we received PHIG funding. We’re small but mighty — and we get a lot done.

ARANA:
Thank you! While we wait for more questions to come in, I’d like to ask one for each of you to answer briefly: What do you wish you had known when you were first embarking on this AHD partnership journey with your agencies?

HIGGINBOTHAM:
I can start. In a state department of health, things tend to move slowly. We had an older AHD agreement that had been drafted at some point, but it wasn’t suitable for what we wanted to do. I wish I had known earlier that PHF offers sample agreements on their website. It would have been really helpful to go to our legal department with that language already in hand and pick and choose what applied to our model. Drafting our agreement and deploying it to schools ended up being a long process, and I think it could have gone much faster if I had used those resources from the start.

RICCI:
I can also chime in. I think the biggest thing — especially looking back to when we started in 2015 — is that we really wished we had access to more concrete, tangible examples of what others were doing. We wanted to see different ideas, different types of programs people had tried, and what counted as part of an academic health department. It would have been helpful to have a kind of toolbox or guide, which is essentially what we’re building now through conversations like this. But back then, we really needed more exposure to what was possible and what kinds of programming could support students, staff, and faculty.

GUTIÉRREZ MARTÍNEZ:
I’ll add that I wish I had made the connection to PHF and their resources sooner. When conversations about academic public health departments first started, it felt like a huge undertaking. I was in a support role at the time, and it was hard to imagine how we’d make it work. But once I started digging into the PHF website and exploring their resources, I had that “aha” moment — realizing we were already doing a lot of this work. We just didn’t have systems or tracking in place.

My advice to anyone starting this journey is to give yourself grace. It’s what you make of it, and there’s always room for continuous improvement. PHF also offers great support for quality assurance and quality improvement. Even during this talk, I’ve been taking notes from my colleagues — new ideas to pursue, new ways to tell our story. So lean on others who are passionate about this work and see the benefit.

ARANA:
Next question is for Casie: I’m curious about Tennessee’s advisory committee of 11 individuals. Are those individuals representative of all the academic public health programs in the state? If not, how did you choose them?

HIGGINBOTHAM:
Yes, those 11 individuals represent the 11 colleges and universities across our state that offer a public health program. That was the easiest and most logical place to start, especially since we already had partnerships with most of those schools. That said, we’re not locked into that number. We’ve already started reaching out to programs like Master of Health Administration and Laboratory Science, and we’re excited about the possibility of including faculty from those areas on our advisory committee as well.

ARANA:
Great. Next question for all of you: What do you think a health department should have in place before pursuing an AHD partnership?

RICCI:
Rhode Island, it was really important to establish clear goals before reaching out and starting to build partnerships. Ten years ago, the concept of an academic health department was still very new, so we had to decide what we wanted it to look like before we started building it. It’s a long process — we’ve had ours for a decade, and I still have a list of ideas I want to implement. So give yourself grace. It takes time to see progress and change.

HIGGINBOTHAM:
I agree with Jen and would add that in our case, it’s been really important to have champions for the AHD concept among our executive and senior leadership. These leaders are often out in the community, crossing paths with academic partners. When they understand and support the AHD, they can help build and reinforce those connections. Their consistent support has been incredibly helpful.

GUTIÉRREZ MARTÍNEZ:
I’d echo what both of my colleagues said. Having leadership buy-in is critical. Our director is a strong advocate for continued education and for building the pipeline between education and the public health workforce. I often frame it like this: yes, ideally we’d love for every student to become a full-time employee and stay with us for their entire career—but that’s not always realistic in our current workforce. My goal is that at least when they come through our public health system they understand and whatever role they end up in still look through their work with a public health lens, which would still reinforce the work we are trying to do in public health. They will still understand how public health is everywhere.

From an administrative and HR perspective, I’d also recommend looking into agreements. That became our go-to system. When a student, professor, or university approaches us, we ask them to send over their documents so we can get that in motion, get it approved — reviewed by legal, approved by risk management, and signed. That structure gives us the openness to welcome students. I always tell students: it’s very rare that I’ll say we can’t place you. We’ve hosted students in graphic design, kinesiology, computer science, software engineering — we need all of that within our infrastructure. Coming from a business background and now having nearly 15 years in public health, I can say it’s so fulfilling to apply your skill set to something bigger than yourself. And I want to encourage students to see that and integrate it into their work wherever they end up.

ARANA:
Thank you all so much again — not only for your presentations but also for taking the time to answer questions from participants. There are no more questions in the Q&A at the moment, so Anna, I’ll turn it back to you to close us out.

BRADLEY:
Wonderful. Thank you all so much. Not only were those great presentations, but you all stayed really well on time, which I love.

I do want to share the evaluation information. I’ll go ahead and drop the Bit.ly link in the chat for everyone. We’d love to hear your thoughts on today’s session — what’s working well, and how we can continue to improve. Please take a moment, if you can, to complete that brief evaluation.

And that’s it — that’s all we have for you today. We really appreciate your time. Be sure to check out the ASTHO events page for more upcoming opportunities. We have a couple of performance improvement webinars coming up on May 7th and May 21st, both focused on performance management systems, so we hope to see you there.

Have a wonderful rest of your day, and thank you again to all of our speakers and to everyone who took 90 minutes out of their day to be here with us. We’re truly grateful.