CDC’s Center for State, Tribal, Local and Territorial Support (CSTLTS) has approved up to $5 million in funding for eligible governmental public health departments to be distributed over a period of 24 months when a crisis occurs.
According to CDC’s website, the funding is available under the OT18-1804: Technical Assistance for Response to Public Health or Healthcare Crises cooperative agreement — “a novel approach to emergency response that will allow CDC to expedite funding to qualified organizations so they can provide expert technical assistance and other support to entities engaged in a public health or healthcare crisis.”
CDC will collect qualified proposals from eligible applicants and make funding available once the agency declares a public health emergency response is needed.
Applicant Strategies
Approved applicants will provide assistance and expertise under two strategies:
Strategy 1: Effective Process Implementation
Process is a critical success factor in response efforts, where lives may depend on the speed of a transaction, placement of personnel or delivery of equipment. Therefore, awardees must have strength in and be able to effectively perform the activities associated with each of the following process areas:
- Expedited procurement: Superseding normal acquisition procedures to accelerate delivery
- Agile administration and operations: Reacting to requests, developing plans, deploying resources and performing administrative actions quickly and with highly coordinated communication
- Strategic partnering: Rapidly engaging partners from multiple sectors to amplify, augment, or otherwise improve response efforts
Strategy 2: Critical Content Expertise
The awardees’ strength in process implementation (addressed by Strategy 1) serves as the foundation for delivering critical content expertise. Awardees must have demonstrated strength in and be able to provide support in one or more of the following content areas:
- Administrative logistics: Travel, transportation, shipping, printing, transcription, meetings and event planning, small purchases, etc.
- Communications: Situational awareness, risk communications, media support, project monitoring and reporting, cultural and lingual translation, graphics, writing/editing, training development and delivery, etc.
- Human resources and specialized expertise: Recruiting, hiring, general staff augmentation, payroll, onboarding, orientation, and acquisition of specialized expertise, including but not limited to epidemiology, entomology, infectious disease, environmental health and emergency response, etc.
- Direct services: Performing specific emergency response activities on behalf of a third party because of a gap in that third party’s capabilities and because CDC has determined that this gap threatens the effectiveness of the response as a whole. (Note: “direct services” in this context does not mean “provision of care.”)
Applications are due November 30, 2018.
