A guide by New America to help cities and states set up cash assistance programs for their residents, based on the Alia Cares platform that the National Domestic Workers Alliance built to run their Coronavirus Cares Fund that provides emergency assistance for home care workers to support them in staying safe and at home to slow the spread of COVID.
This playbook offers a comprehensive guide for designing, implementing, and evaluating a guaranteed income program specifically for individuals experiencing homelessness.
This playbook outlines the ways Community Action and human services agencies worked together to meet the pandemic challenge—what worked well, obstacles and difficulties, and lessons learned to inform the path forward, partnering to achieve a more equitable recovery. It also explains how communities have leveraged opportunities to partner on approaches that hold the promise of deeper, longer lasting changes for families—work shaped by families’ wishes and strengths and designed to advance both family-level and systems-level change.
American Public Human Services Association (APHSA)
Dana Chisnell describes work leading a team of researchers to interview people from across the US on their experiences applying for unemployment and other benefits during the pandemic.
The Pandemic Electronic Benefits Transfer (P-EBT) program was launched as an effort to address the loss of access to free and reduced-price school meals due to widespread school closures at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. As schools reopened in a shifting mix of fully virtual, hybrid, and inperson formats and families lacked consistent access to school meals, these benefits were extended through the 2020–21 school year and were highly valuable to families in buffering the full extent of food insecurity they may have faced during this uncertain time. However, the complexity of administering this program was a fundamental barrier in providing timely support to families, who ultimately went without benefits for at least half of the school year. In this report, we dive into the challenges state administrators faced in launching this new program during the 2020–21 school year and reflect on considerations for the future.
This blog post outlines how address validation tools can improve delivery of critical benefits by ensuring mailing addresses are accurate and up-to-date.
The report beings by briefly describing the challenge that disabled workers face in accessing UI and the benefits of reforming the system to better serve these workers. The report then presents a list of considerations for UI reform in the areas of administrative process and technology improvements as well as considerations for policy change.
This toolkit provides individuals and organizations with guidance, drawn from learning and experience, on how to use administrative and other data to inform program improvements. It collects concrete strategies and practitioner-tested tools designed to advance these efforts. These materials were developed in pilot projects with local Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) agencies as part of the TANF Data Collaborative (TDC).
Through the interviews, ULP sought to capture details of claimant experience, see how and why system failures occurred, and make recommendations for reform now—before another financial or public health crisis suddenly causes state unemployment rates to spike.
