Maricopa County received 31 National Achievement Awards this year from the National Association of Counties (NACo) for programs that increase residents’ well-being and improve the use of technology to transform how we do business.
The award-winning programs summarized below include Air Quality’s Mowing Down Pollution, Human Services’ Cooking Success: Excelling In and Out of the Kitchen, and Maricopa County Libraries’ Ukuleles at Your Library.
“As the nation’s fastest-growing and fourth most populous county, Maricopa County continues to focus on improving our services and programs to our residents,” said Chairman Bill Gates, Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, District 3. “We appreciate the recognition of our efforts to make our programs more cost effective and efficient, and to improve the overall health of our residents and community.”
Mowing Down Pollution is an Air Quality program that allows residents to recycle their gasoline-powered lawn mower in exchange for a voucher to purchase an electric lawn mower and other lawn equipment.
Cooking Success: Excelling In and Out of the Kitchen is a program between the Human Services Department, Sheriff’s Office, Adult Probation, Arizona Department of Corrections and St. Mary’s Food Bank Alliance’s Community Kitchen. Through the program, inmates work in the Food Factory while in custody, and once released on probation, continue culinary training at Community Kitchen. They are then placed with employers within Maricopa County for full time employment.
Ukuleles at Your Library is a partnership between Maricopa County’s Sun City and Fairway Libraries and the Sun City Ukulele Club that provides ukuleles to residents for three weeks at a time. It comes with a kit that includes a tuner and a beginner’s song book, allowing residents to learn the instrument and socialize with others in Sun City who are learning how to play.
Maricopa County’s programs help modernize county government and increase services to our residents. NACo, an organization that unites the nation’s nearly 3,100 counties, recognized that Maricopa County programs have achieved measurable results worth sharing nationwide.
See a list of all of our Achievement Award winners here.