This article from Civil Eats explores how expanding online purchasing options for SNAP recipients can improve food security, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Better Rules utilizes multidisciplinary teams that include people skilled in policy, legal, business rules, programming, and service design working together in an iterative fashion to develop rules. Several outputs are produced using this approach, each offering an opportunity that can be fed back into that iterative process and re-used to solve other issues.
Important considerations for understanding user needs to inform responsive design in rapidly changing contexts are discussed, including how context, threat perception, decision-making, and crisis affects disaster management and UX research.
“Interoperability” refers to systems’ ability to interact with each other to share data so that a customer is connected with as many benefits as possible in an efficient way. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was originally intended to be interoperable, but this has not occurred yet. Promoting interoperability in the ACA is imperative, as it would help alleviate food insecurity through automatic benefits enrollment.
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.
This article examines how the decentralization of safety net programs after welfare reform has led to growing inequality in benefit generosity and access across U.S. states.
A guide to navigating New York City’s public services. It was made with and for families of students living in temporary housing or experiencing homelessness and the NYC Department of Education’s Office of Students in Temporary Housing (STH).
This blog post discusses strategies that states can implement to make public assistance applications more accessible during the COVID-19 crisis, emphasizing the importance of flexibility in application processes to accommodate increased demand and social distancing measures.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, states utilized temporary Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) flexibilities to provide emergency benefits and maintain support for households with children missing school meals.
This report evaluates state government websites for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), providing links to each state's site and assessing the information and services they offer.
