Helping Governments and Businesses Go Back to Work Safely
Soundmark advisor, Liz McQueen, CRPC® and her husband, John, are volunteering their talents to Restart Partners, a Seattle based nonprofit organization that works to develop partnerships with states, cities, and universities throughout the world with the goal of enabling people to resume life in a post COVID-19 environment.
Restart Partners newest initiative, “WearAMaskWA,” is a joint campaign with Washington State. Their goal is to foster collaboration between state and local government leaders with regard to personal protective equipment (PPE), testing, and changing the social norms around the perceived stigma of wearing masks to help save lives.
Predicting the need for PPE and testing is an enormous challenge. Restart Partners has developed a decision-making model to plan and anticipate the resurgence of COVID-19. The model has been developed with input from and validated by demographic data, epidemiological data, and PPE estimates by city, county and state.
Restart Partners also has several supply chain experts. Currently, states are forced to compete with one another for PPE, which drives up prices and makes it harder for smaller states to purchase PPE efficiently. By working with states, counties and 
enterprises to source suppliers, the organization is aiming to help businesses both large and small to form purchasing co-operatives. This will allow them to mimic the purchasing power of large entities, effectively reducing costs, among other things.
Long term, the organization’s goal is to develop a robust model to address not only COVID-19, but outbreaks of any infectious diseases be it Ebola, a resurgence of COVID-19 or some yet unknown pandemic.
You can find more information on Restart Partners at www.restart.us. or follow them on Facebook.