In Bernalillo County, a series of high-profile behavioral health-related challenges led to an allocated $17 million per year for the county to spend on providing high-risk populations with targeted behavioral health services. The GPL provided pro bono technical assistance to help the county develop a strategic procurement system to most effectively spend the newly allocated dollars, which included identifying behavioral health service needs, best practices, and priority populations as well as developing and implementing a...
Denver sought to provide individuals experiencing homelessness with permanent alternatives to costly emergency services such as hospitals and shelters. As part of the Permanent Supportive Housing Pay for Success initiative, the GPL helped Denver identify the most costly chronically homeless individuals who were also involved with the criminal justice system as candidates for supportive housing. With its project partners, the City is building 160 new units and using 90 existing units to house these individuals and testing the results with a five-year randomized control trial....
Improving referrals and treatment adherence among child welfare parents in need of behavioral health services and using data for more informed strategies to reduce child fatalities
Developing a performance-based contracting strategy for delivery of critical services to ensure children are placed in the most appropriate setting and are provided the most effective services
Creating performance metrics, developing short- and long-term strategies for service allocation, and aligning the service array around the core needs of children and families served by the state
In 2013, over 50 percent of the 36,000 cases investigated by Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families (DCF) had an indication of parental substance use. DCF hoped to support these recovering parents by matching them to recovery and support services while limiting removals of their children, so the agency worked with the GPL to launch the Family Stability Pay for Success project. This project identified a crucial gap in services for families with children aged 3-6 and expanded these services to support 500 additional families in need. The GPL also worked with DCF to...
In Illinois, approximately 700 youth per year become simultaneously involved in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. These dually-involved youth experience very poor outcomes; on average 1,300 arrests per year and 230,000 days spent in congregate care. With pro-bono technical assistance from the GPL, the state tested a new model for supporting families involved with multiple agencies and has re-engineered data systems to improve performance management and referral processes. It now takes the state child welfare agency less than three days to identify a dually-involved youth,...
The California Department of Social Services (CDSS) operates a workforce development program for CalFresh recipients called SNAP Employment and Training (E&T). In California, counties run their own E&T programs, with funding provided by the state and federal governments. GPL helped expand and improve E&T programming in three ways. First, GPL helped the state explore new ways to use federal matching funds that can create a perpetual, sustainable funding stream with a one-time investment of state dollars. Second, GPL facilitated a data match of county E&T...
While Massachusetts has some of the highest educational performance in the country, the state continues to face challenges in supporting the employment and career success of English language learners and those who have not achieved high school credentials. With pro bono technical assistance from the GPL, Massachusetts launched a project to provide vocationally-oriented adult basic education and English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) services to approximately 2,000 adults over the course of three years. The program is expected to improve earnings and education outcomes...
The Boston Public Works Department’s contracts for road resurfacing were overly focused on achieving mileage targets to the detriment of other key goals, such as maintaining steady work flows and minimizing inconvenience to constituents. With pro-bono technical assistance from the GPL, the city incorporated results-driven contracting strategies to reorient the roadway resurfacing contracts around a holistic set of goals, provide vendors with incentives to meet these goals, and increase the flow of performance data enabling the Department to course correct issues in real-time. The...
The City of Boston spends over $120 million on construction projects every year but lacked the infrastructure to systematically share project information and effectively coordinate project management across departments. As a result, multi-departmental projects were falling behind schedule and running over budget. With pro-bono technical assistance from the GPL, the city launched a problem-based procurement for a cross-department capital project management IT system. The procurement aimed to standardize project management processes, increase the flow of data,...
Boston faced a number of challenges with its bike share system – some stations frequently had no available bikes while others were completely full, total ridership was lower than expected, and access was limited in low-income and minority communities. To address these challenges, the GPL provided pro bono technical assistance to help the city reshape the bike share system through the procurement of a new system operator. The procurement implemented performance metrics that better...
