In Austin, there are over 2,000 individuals without a safe place to sleep. There are many reasons a person can become homeless, and these reasons range from the lack of affordable housing to the loss of family and community. In 2017, the Innovation Office secured a three-year $1.25m grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies to focus on the city's goal of ending homelessness. The grant funds an i-team to help the city identify the best ways for City Council, departments, and the community to collaborate towards a shared understanding of homelessness in Austin.
A modern system that helps people learn about, apply for, and gain access to affordable housing. Bloom Housing is an open source platform that digitizes the process of finding and applying for affordable housing, turning a time-consuming paper process into a 15 minute activity from one's smartphone or computer.
Data provided by the NYC Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity regarding benefit, program, and resource information for over 80 health and human services available to NYC residents in all eleven local law languages.
This paper discusses the country’s chronic underinvestment in children and resulting outcomes, including new data on poverty rates among young children, is inextricable from the prospects of young children; and the remarkably comprehensive pandemic-era response policies, including which changes contributed most to reducing child poverty.
The Atlanta Fed’s CLIFF tools provide greater transparency to workers about potential public assistance losses when their earnings increase. We find three broad themes in organization-level implementation of the CLIFF tools: identifying the tar- get population of users; integrating the tool into existing operations; and integrating the tool into coaching sessions.
This report details findings and lessons from a project to develop a calculator to help people anticipate how a change in earnings from employment would affect their net income and information on their estimated effective marginal tax rate.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
The Policy Rules Database (PRD), developed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and the National Center for Children in Poverty, consolidates complex rules for major U.S. federal and state benefit programs and tax policies into a standardized, easy-to-use format. This database allows researchers to model public assistance impacts, simulate policy changes, and analyze benefits cliffs across various household scenarios using common rules and language across different programming platforms.
A modernized public benefits system would better serve program participants, administrators, policy makers, and taxpayers. This paper proposes a set of principles both define the desired future state and outline the values that shape decision making along the way. Practices describe the processes needed to achieve modernization.
Github repository for Policy Rules Database, which encodes up-to-date rules and provisions for all major federal and state public assistance programs, taxes, and tax credits.
NYC's My File NYC and New Jersey's unemployment insurance system improvements demonstrate how successful digital innovations can be scaled across various programs, leveraging trust-building, open-source technology, and strategic partnerships.
