Category: State Government Projects

Nationally, the meals of more than two million students who are eligible for free or reduced price breakfasts go unserved. While this is a problem nationally, Florida is one of the states with the highest percentage of eligible students who are not consuming the free or reduced price meals they are eligible for, especially in secondary schools.

The purpose of Evergreen Solutions’ contract with the Florida Department of Education, which concluded in August 2008, was to study the reasons for this lack of participation in Florida’s 67 school districts. The scope of services includes designing tools, strategies, and preparing for the use of effective, tailored market research for secondary students, staff, and parents.

Evergreen Solutions, in association with Five Points Technology, provided the Florida Department of Health outsourcing services to fulfill the Department’s Public Health and Medical Preparedness and Response Consultant position.

As a function of this agreement, the consultant:

• reviewed the relationship of other community providers as well as local Emergency Management Plans.
• assured that exercises and plans were in keeping with practical aspects of the problem being addressed.
• attempted to formulate a building block approach to disaster planning that allowed for public and private entities to achieve success and not be overcome by the scenario.
• promoted the integration of rumor control into public information operations.
• worked with the projects’ already established local and state committees to obtain consensus on the planning.
• worked with project managers to obtain final approvals from the SWG and the DSOC, as appropriate.
• advised, when appropriate, the ongoing information exchange with other response partners, in particular hospitals, long-term care, fire/rescue, law enforcement, and education.
• worked with exercise design consultant in development of scenarios.

Evergreen Solutions maintained outsourcing contracts with other municipal government organizations.

The Florida Department of Management Services (DMS) retained Evergreen Solutions to create a statewide workforce strategic plan. The purpose of this project was to develop a strategic planning document with recommendations that served as the State’s roadmap for human resource policy guidance for the next five years. This roadmap assisted DMS in providing innovative, world-class human resource services designed to recruit, retain, reward and recognize a high-performance workforce for the State of Florida through 2012. The Strategic Plan was created to address three critical components: workforce design, compensation and benefits, and workforce training and development.

To generate a comprehensive understanding of stakeholder perspectives, Evergreen Solutions interviewed state-level leaders, engaged employees through focus groups, and conducted trend analysis. In addition, Evergreen Solutions administered an electronic survey statewide and that generated feedback from more than 20,000 employees across all departments and agencies. This research assisted Evergreen Solutions in creating meaningful action-driven recommendations.

Evergreen Solutions was also retained by the DMS to conduct a Best Practices Review of its internal human resources operation. A multi-faceted, multi-level approach was utilized that included focus groups, interviews, peer review, process analysis, best practices, benchmarking, and gap analysis. Based on data from each of these tools, a variety of operational commendations and recommendations were made.