We unite state, Tribal, local, and territorial public health leaders; universities and training providers; philanthropy; federal agencies; the public health workforce; community members; policy makers; and partners in healthcare and other sectors to strategically align our collective actions, support and promote new and relevant research, facilitate shared learning, and improve understanding of the urgency and significance of a well-trained, well-resourced, and diverse public health workforce.
History
In 2013, the National Consortium for Public Health Workforce Development, established by the de Beaumont Foundation, convened public health leaders from more than 30 national public health membership associations, federal agencies, and public health workforce peer networks to identify areas of alignment among their priorities.
Informed by a national survey of the public health workforce in 2014, the Consortium met throughout 2015 to review and discuss the importance of an emerging set of strategic skills for the public health workforce and how, if implemented, these skills could impact the public health workforce.
In 2017, the Consortium released Building Skills for a More Strategic Public Health Workforce: A Call to Action, identifying the 8 skills that all public health workforce members should attain, regardless of their role. While there has been notable progress in the socialization of these recommendations, further work is required to dismantle the obstacles to ensuring their mastery within the public health workforce.
In 2020, the de Beaumont Foundation convened a Planning Committee to relaunch the National Consortium for Public Health Workforce Development and to develop an action plan for strengthening and supporting the public health workforce. The COVID-19 pandemic had laid bare and exacerbated gaps in the workforce, and persistent health disparities highlighted the need to ensure the workforce could support communities.
Funding
The National Consortium for Public Health Workforce Development and this website are supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as part of a financial assistance award totaling $141,982 with 23 percentage funded by CDC/HHS and $486,948 amount and 77 percentage funded by the de Beaumont Foundation. The contents are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the official views of, nor an endorsement, by CDC/HHS, or the U.S. Government.
We created an operational plan to clarify the structure and management of the Consortium.
Steering Committee Members
The Steering Committee was responsible for developing the National Consortium’s common agenda, clarifying the challenges, identifying the goals, and defining the strategies the Consortium will undertake. Collectively, they determined that an equity-centered approach was an imperative.
Founders Committee Members
The Founders Committee came together to create a vision for the collective movement to change the public health workforce. They were responsible for imagining and defining what a successful collaborative change effort would look like, adjusting this original vision to account for the global COVID-19 pandemic, selecting a systems change expert to lead the work through a request for proposal process, and providing guidance to the selected applicant, FSG, about how to build the foundation of this collective impact process.