Comprehensive and sustained improvement in benefits access and customer experience requires changes across policy, operations, technology, staffing, procurement, and more. This guide offers a collection of actions and best practices for states to apply.
Article describing the “time tax,” the costs to people applying or benefits in terms of spending substantial amounts of time navigating user-unfriendly interfaces. The article describes the necessity of simplifying safety-net programs and cross-coordinating across various social service programs.
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.
This study examines how providing information about administrative burden influences public support for government programs like TANF, showing that awareness of these burdens can increase favorability toward the programs and their recipients.
The NYC Benefits Screening API provides machine-readable calculations and criteria for benefits screening that power the ACCESS NYC screening questionnaire.
This Urban Institute report examines how public investments in children's health, education, and welfare yield significant short- and long-term benefits for both individuals and society.
This report calculates the cumulative impact of major benefit programs on two types of families and how their benefits change as they move into the labor market and climb the ladder of upward mobility.
The COVID Response Project was funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to document the real-time impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on state human services agencies and capture state perspectives on lessons learned to guide future federal policymaking and state implementation. The project was completed by the American Public Human Services Association (APHSA) in partnership with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families (ACF), Office of Regional Operations. Insights from the report reflect information obtained through APHSA’s on-going support of state human services agencies’ COVID-19 response efforts as well as a series of in-depth interviews with executive leadership of the 14 state health and human services agencies in ACF’s Region 1 (New England) and Region 4 (Southeast) areas.
American Public Human Services Association (APHSA)
This study investigates how administrative burdens influence differential receipt of income transfers after a family member loses a job, looking at Unemployment Insurance, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
This resource describes how different agencies have updated their systems to increase online and mobile access to benefits information and applications, including using text messages to share benefits information with residents.
