COVID-19 Emergency Funding Response

Public health operations • budget development • stakeholder coordination • emergency response • reporting workflows

This case study is based on APHL’s emergency COVID-19 cooperative agreement proposal to CDC. The work was operational, analytical, and time-sensitive: turn rapidly changing public health response priorities into a complete, executable funding package while program staff were simultaneously engaged in active pandemic-response work.

Challenge

APHL needed to develop and submit a major emergency cooperative agreement proposal in under two weeks. The submission had to consolidate budgets, workplans, and federal application materials across multiple program areas while the scope and funding assumptions continued to shift late in the process.

The work required coordination across program leadership, administrative teams, and CDC officials, with enough structure to keep the submission coherent under a compressed timeline.

Role

I helped orchestrate development and submission of the proposal, serving as a primary liaison between APHL program leadership and CDC officials while coordinating the internal budget and application workflow.

Key responsibilities included:

• translating rapidly changing response priorities into budget and workplan materials;
• consolidating inputs across approximately 18 projects and 5 program directors;
• aligning technical, programmatic, and administrative stakeholders;
• keeping budget, workplan, and application materials consistent as scope changed;
• supporting a complete submission package under sustained deadline pressure.

Outcome

The proposal was fully funded at $170M+.

The funding supported expanded public health laboratory testing capacity, state access to testing materials and equipment, workforce and data fellowship growth, and informatics infrastructure including the AIMS platform.

Skills Demonstrated

• Emergency-response operations coordination.
• Budget development and review under deadline pressure.
• Stakeholder translation across technical, programmatic, administrative, and federal audiences.
• Consolidation of decentralized project plans into a unified application package.
• Reporting and workflow judgment in a high-stakes public health funding environment.