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.
Code for America helped expand GetCalFresh (a service that guides Californians through the SNAP application process and helps government deliver food assistance to people in need) from a small pilot into a statewide service. They also recently concluded a similar pilot in Michigan along with Civilla and the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.
The New South Wales government describes its efforts to connect with other Australian jurisdictions and international colleagues in its move towards making machine-consumable legislation and policy.
Approximately 12 million low-income individuals risk missing out on federal stimulus payments due to non-filing status, prompting the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) to recommend targeted state outreach to connect eligible non-filers with their Economic Impact Payments (EIPs).
Policy changes are often dynamic and occur quickly, but they can only create impact once implemented. The Eligibility APIs Initiative at 18F shares an example from their work that shows the potential for rapid, accurate policy implementation as code.
Demand for public benefits is rising in response to continued economic pressure on vulnerable people, in addition to changes in eligibility rules for some safety net programs. This report summarizes existing benefits access efforts, studies the successes and challenges of benefits expansion efforts through a subset of in-depth case studies, and analyzes the potential for sustaining, expanding, and replicating successful efforts.
Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE)
18F describes modular contracting, the process of breaking up large, custom software procurements into a small constellation of smaller contracts. Modular procurement requires agile, product thinking, user-centered design, DevSecOps, and loosely-coupled architecture.