By Office of Equity and Community Partnerships, Public Health – Seattle & King County

Sometimes systems that were intended to create fairness backfire. Organizations and vendors should have equal opportunity to bid for government contracts, so government agencies typically use Requests for Proposals (RFPs) in an attempt to open up contracting. But in reality, this process can add to disparity. For example, if you are a small organization or business, you probably don’t have dedicated staff who can easily respond to RFPs. Even for highly capable staff, it can be daunting and discouraging if you haven’t been through the process before or if you don’t meet criteria that were likely created for large organizations. The bureaucratic terminology is an additional barrier—especially if you are not a native speaker of English.

Not surprisingly, smaller community-based organizations often do not apply or are not selected for work that they are highly qualified to do. Long term, these government processes perpetually leave out people and communities because the right systems weren’t in place to include them.

“We need more community-led processes embedded within our administrative systems,” said Halima Lozano, grant manager in Public Health’s Office of Equity and Community Partnerships (OECP). “We are centering and co-creating with community more and more, but there is still a lot of work to do in our organization to break down barriers and make contracting more equitable.”

Time for a change

When the CDC awarded Public Health – Seattle & King County a COVID-19 & Health Equity grant in 2021, it provided $2 million in funding to support community-based organizations (CBOs) that have been working to address health disparities. The grant required an RFP process to get the funding to organizations so that they could continue their efforts, as well as build additional capacity to address persistent health inequities. In keeping with the intent of the grant, staff in the Office of Equity and Community Partnerships (OECP) made three types of improvements to the RFP process to make it more equitable and community-informed.

#1 Listen to the community partners.

In spring of 2023, Contracts, Procurement and Real Estate Services (CPRES) and OECP collaborated on an Equitable Contracting initiative. Along with Culture Shift Consulting, they held feedback sessions with community partners to develop a report of community recommendations. In addition, the team worked with a community advisory group to review drafts of the RFP and advise Public Health staff about how to adapt it to make the opportunity known as widely as possible among organizations who are qualified to do the work.

“[We] appreciate the support and opportunity to help create a community driven project built to fit community needs,” noted a member of the Community Advisory Group. “[Public Health] took the time to engage in active listening and discussion with community members on this.”

#2 Turn feedback into RFP improvements.

Building on their insight and feedback, OECP staff made the process more equitable through a number of improvements, including:

• Providing free technical assistance and interpretation for application writing;
• Reducing the minimum annual revenue required;
• Allowing small organizations to apply under a fiscal sponsor or coalition;
• Including community members in the application review panel; and
• Holding information sessions in multiple languages and promoting RFP in community and multilingual media.

Twenty-nine of the 32 applicants were able to partake in the application technical assistance, and the equity improvements resulted in stronger applications.

“For this RFP, we received a large number of high quality applications from a much broader pool of organizations,” said Saba Al-Harazi, CPRES community contracting manager. “It really speaks to how a more level playing field is possible when you remove barriers created by a lack of experience and language differences.”

#3 Extra support in managing grant funding for small community organizations

Based on community recommendations and findings, grant awardees received supports to help develop the capacity needed for federally-funded grant projects, including:

• training in financial management specific to working with federal requirements;
• continued coaching; and
• technical assistance throughout the project.

“We felt supported with our program manager following up with us on a regular basis and answering all of our questions immediately,” said one awardee. “We hope that this model of contract monitoring would be a standard for all Public Health contracts.”

What’s next

The contracts are coming to an end, and the team has created several opportunities for awardees to provide feedback to our Contracting Equity team, part of the CDC Public Health Infrastructure Grant. This team is working to prioritize and enact more equitable contracting processes, based on the community input last year, in collaboration with their community-led Equity Contracting Governance Group. This work was just a start for Public Health building momentum for equitable county processes.