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The governmental public health workforce provides essential public health services to communities from public health agencies operations at the local, state, and federal levels of government. The roles and duties of public health workers range from infectious disease tracking and control to healthy eating promotion to checking food service establishments for safety. Unfortunately, most of the time, the general public is unaware of, and unconcerned with, public health’s primary mission of disease prevention. This behind-the-scenes, service-oriented workforce has responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by working long hours, extra days, and ever-changing job roles, all while becoming targets of political attacks and enduring substantially elevated psychological distress and burnout. Though this workforce is not well enumerated, existing studies indicate that public health workers face higher anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and burnout than other frontline healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic response. Several strategies have been suggested to address these vulnerabilities, including increasing the amount and stability of available funding, implementing organizational-level policies and programming to boost resilience, and providing individual-level social support, both instrumental and emotional, to protect against burnout and other psychological distresses.

The world of management and technology has become accustomed to the notion of “2.0” advancements and transformative innovations. Is the field of Change Management/Organizational Development itself in this story? Not enough! We re-examine the field’s foundational beliefs, practices, focus, research directions, and value add. We conclude that there is strong evidence from the front line and from an IBM Case Study that the field must “reboot” – to rethink our methods and frameworks; the role and skills of change leadership for the future; change practitioner capabilities for the future; the metrics needed to evaluate progress; and the knowledge exchange between Academe and practitioners.

Symbolic interaction may not have much of a future. Rome is burning; the Titanic is sinking; and still the band plays on. With some notable exceptions, we symbolic interactionists, as a group, appear to be sitting around, paralyzed, watching events unfold from the dizzying heights of our ivory tower, grumbling under our collective breath about how bad things are, but not yet doing enough, much like the rest of the world.You take the blue pill; the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. (Morpheus from The Matrix)