The pandemic highlighted significant gaps in the public health infrastructure impacted by shortages of public health workers, an undertrained workforce, and years of disinvestment. These gaps required innovative problem-solving by public health agencies (PHAs), including local health departments (LHDs), to respond to rapidly changing community conditions during and after the pandemic. Many schools and programs of public health (SPPH) worked with PHAs to mobilize public health (PH) students through practice-based teaching (PBT). Current research indicates PBT benefits all stakeholders—PHAs, students, faculty, SPPH, and ultimately the community served. However, more research is needed on the utility of PBT in addressing a community’s systemic public health issues, the extent to which the academic-community collaboration enhances a PHA’s capacity, and the impact of the pedagogy on preparing the workforce for an evolving PH landscape. This paper examines the process of a semester-long PBT course, guided by the PBT STEPS framework, which includes five steps from collaboration to implementation to evaluation of a PBT course. The collaborating PHA and its student group addressed community trauma and resilience issues during the semester. Additionally, it examines the longer-term impacts after the semester for the PHA, community, and the workforce by 1) conducting a formative evaluation to understand needs and gaps in the community; 2) redesigning an intervention that merged the results of the formative evaluation with the intervention developed during the semester; and 3) securing funding and resources for intervention sustainability. Through the documentation of a post-course partnership between an LHD and faculty at a large school of public health, this case study illustrates the potential for PBT to lay the foundation for ongoing research that supports more impactful interventions for PHAs while bolstering the workforce abilities of students as future practitioners.
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