For Terralyn Wiley, winner of the HILLTOP Agency Staff Award, government work is all about forming relationships with the community she serves.
Before her current role at the County, Wiley was a site coordinator for the Schools Uniting Neighborhoods (SUN), a Department of County Human Services (DCHS) program designed to provide additional enrichment, services and support to children in the public school system.
Wiley saw firsthand how she could make a difference for the County’s most vulnerable communities.
When she was hired by Multnomah County as a program specialist in 2018, Wiley’s goal was to forge deep connections between the County, specialists, service providers, and the communities she served. “Once I started working at the County I was like ‘I want our organizations to understand that we’re public servants and we’re here for them,’” she says.
Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Wiley and her co-leader Robyn Johnson, a planning and development specialist at DCHS, distributed $1 million of County financial assistance to communities most greatly impacted by the pandemic. Wiley and her team focused the funding on BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) community organizations and used gift cards as a means of distribution. The program spanned 43 organizations across the County and received partial funding through the Department of County Human Services.
Wiley says the goal of using gift cards was to distribute the funds in the quickest and most accessible way possible, especially important during a pandemic. To receive a gift card, community members had only to provide their household name, the number of people in their household, and acknowledge that they were a County resident. “We want to help however we can,” she says. “And we’re not gonna make you jump through a million hoops for this.”
Guided by her relationship-building principles, Wiley used a hands-on approach to working with the various community organizations involved.
Wiley worked closely with community organizations to determine the level of funding required.
In many instances, she even orchestrated and attended different in-person organization gift card distribution events. “I really feel like our community based organization representatives are our teammates and I'm here to do my part in helping us achieve our goal of supporting our communities,” she says. “They have my phone number, we text, we call, whatever they need. It feels really great.”
The project not only allowed Wiley to provide relief to communities severely impacted by COVID-19 but to accomplish her original goal of cultivating relationships among the
County, community organizations, and community members.
“The most rewarding part of this entire project has just been hearing from our organizations about how their faith is restored in the County and in working with the County,” she says. “Working hand-in-hand with these organizations… we’re able to serve some community members… who have never, in 20-plus years, ever received community service from the County or any government entity,” she says.