Benefits Journey: Applying + Enrolling
-
GetYourRefund.Org: Free tax filing, made simple
GetYourRefund.org is an online portal by Code for America that helps low-income individuals claim thousands of dollars in tax credits, even after the traditional tax deadline has passed.
-
A Playbook for Improving Unemployment Insurance Delivery
A playbook by New America describing lessons learned from past recessions, recent pandemic-inspired innovations, and complementary benefit spaces like SNAP and WIC.
-
The Cash Assistance Implementation Playbook
The purpose of this document is to outline possible technical approaches to supporting a cash assistance program. The report aims to both capture individual approaches as well as overarching insights taken from across the approaches taken by different organizations.
-
Human-Centered Design 
GetCalFresh Demo Website
Demo website for GetCalFresh—Code for America and the state of California’s efforts to simplify the SNAP application process.
-
Human-Centered Design 
Keeping Students Fed in an Uncertain Back to School Season: What We Learned from P-EBT, and What Comes Next
Code for America describes its work building the P-EBT online application and the consulting it provided to 10 states regarding implementing the program in a quick, effective, and human-centered way. Despite herculean efforts among human services and education agencies to get P-EBT off the ground, there were a few key technological, operational, and logistical barriers that consistently got in the way and hampered a smooth rollout of the program across the country.
-
Claim Your Child Tax Credit
Code for America’s simplified tax filing tool that allows users to claim their Child Tax Credit and any missing amount of their third stimulus payment.
-
Human-Centered Design 
Pandemic EBT Policy + Delivery Memo
Policy memo by Code for America regarding how to deliver P-EBT benefits during the COVID-19 crisis.
-
Accessibility 
Technology, Accessibility, and the Child Tax Credit
Code for America describes its work building GetCTC, an e-filer that allows people to file simplified tax returns as specified in the revenue procedure required for the Child Tax Credit.
-
Human-Centered Design 
To reimagine unemployment insurance services, start small
Building modular, open-source, human-centered software is necessary to create equitable government services fit for the digital age. Nava emphasizes addressing large scale digital service challenges by building and releasing small, modular software components that are loosely-coupled by well-defined APIs. This enables agencies to quickly and conistently deliver services that help people immediately, whilst also building a flexible foundation for long-term technical evolution.
-
Human-Centered Design 
Overcoming Barriers: Finding Better Ways to Ask GetCalFresh Applicants About Income
County workers typically spend most of their time trying to get income information right during eligibility interviews. This article provides several recommendations for asking about income, accounting for cognitive biases, under-reporting, and complexities in reporting income.
-
Streamlining SNAP for the Gig Economy
This issue brief explores how states can leverage existing policy to better support self-employed workers. The Simplified Self-Employment Deduction option available to state SNAP programs is a key example of one such supportive policy. This brief discusses the advantages of this policy option, and highlights the experiences of officials in Alabama, Maryland, Nebraska, and South Carolina, in addition to offering a roadmap for other states.
-
Human-Centered Design 
Report: Modernizing Access to the Safety Net
Innovators inside and outside of government are working to improve access to the social safety net using data, technology, and design. This report highlights innovations carried out by The Rockefeller Foundation’s Data and Technology grantees from 2018 to 2021, including extraordinary efforts to meet the challenges of the pandemic. Those grantees are: Benefits Data Trust, Code for America, Georgetown University’s Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation, U.S. Digital Response, and the Digital Innovation and Governance Initiative at New America. In 2020, these projects secured more than $200 million in benefits for close to 100,000 people across at least 36 states, and helped millions more through policy change, training, and guidance.