(l-r) Pearl Sims and Isaac Prilleltensky, Peabody faculty members who were recently awarded a $3.9 million grant from the Tennessee Department of Human Services to partner with that agency to improve service delivery across Tennessee.

_{by Melanie Moran}

Never ones to fear a challenge, Pearl Sims and Isaac Prilleltensky certainly have their hands full now. The Peabody faculty members were recently awarded a $3.9 million grant from the Tennessee Department of Human Services to partner with that agency to improve service delivery across Tennessee. This is the agency that handles the state’s welfare program, food stamps, child support and applications for some TennCare benefits – in short, some of the most used and thorniest public services in the state.

“DHS Commissioner Gina Lodge is very interested in improving customer service and in modeling at the state level efforts that they are already supporting with their smaller partner agencies,” said Sims, director of the Peabody Leadership Development Center. “She asked us to submit a proposal to help her agency accomplish this goal, which resulted in this grant.”

The effort will take place over three years and will be carried out by a team led by Sims and Prilleltensky in partnership with the Department of Human Services, Tennessee State University, the University of Memphis and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

“The design team will include some of the best researchers and practitioners in Tennessee and will focus on effectively using technology to train staff and improve the organization as a whole,” Sims said.

“Our goal is to shift the way human service agencies have traditionally done their work – from focusing on deficits to focusing on strengths, from changing people one at a time to changing organizational and community conditions and from managing crises to preventing them,” said Prilleltensky, professor of human and organizational development.

Under Lodge’s direction, the new Peabody project will take a three-pronged approach that maps out strategies to improve customer service, benchmarks against best practices used by other states and agencies, and tracks the effort as a research project so that it can be used in the future by other states. The team will begin at three DHS pilot sites – Memphis, a rural area and a mid-size community – and then will look toward applying what they have learned in more areas of the state.

“We hope to serve as a relationship broker between state officials in Nashville and the local employees,” Sims said. “We want to meet the needs of the workers who work on the front lines of some of the hardest situations in our state.”

_{Posted 11/14/05}