The King County Innovation Awards honor employees and teams whose projects, improvements, and ingenuity deliver exceptional, measurable results.

This year’s Equity and Social Justice Award recipient is the Department of Public Health – Seattle & King County’s Community Mitigation and Recovery Team (CMR). These honorees consider challenges within their delivery of services to King County residents, and developed solutions that address important needs. They met each challenge in a creative and forward-thinking manner that reflects our True North values.

The pandemic disproportionately affected communities that have been historically underserved. To mitigate the elevated risk of COVID-19 exposure and socio-economic fallout, Public Health – Seattle and King County created a team to support vulnerable populations.

Anita Whitfield, Chief Equity and Inclusion Officer, presented the award, recognizing approximately 50 staff members, representing Public Health, redeployments from other departments, and community partners, who joined together to focus on supporting the community during these unprecedented times.

“The CRM developed an accountability tool to track County progress in implementing community-led COVID-19 strategies and advancing anti-racist policy and system changes,” Whitfield explained. “The tool was then made available to community members, so that they too can track when the County fully adopted, partially adopted, or did not adopt their advice.”

Watch the award presentation video to learn how the team joined with community partners to implement COVID-19 strategies and advance anti-racist policy and system changes. Click here to see the project team members.

Executive’s Performance Excellence Awards series

The Innovation Awards are part of the Executive’s Performance Excellence Awards series, honoring employees and workgroups at King County for their exceptional contributions to performance, leadership, and innovation.

“As we build a best-run government at King County, these awards recognize individuals and teams who have gone above and beyond to look at how they can do things differently to better serve our customers and employees,” said King County Executive Dow Constantine.

Learn more about the King County Performance Excellence Awards.