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 Urban Institute report highlights how immigrant and mixed-status families continued to avoid safety net programs in 2023 due to lingering fears around the public charge rule.
Michigan's UIA director, Julia Dale, is leading the agency through transition by prioritizing lived experience, hope, grit, and values. Virginia's SNAP Program Manager, Michele Thomas, highlighted the success of Sun Bucks, a summer EBT child nutrition program that fed over 700,000 kids in its first year.
The team introduced an AI assistant for benefits navigators to streamline the process and improve outcomes by quickly assessing client eligibility for benefits programs.
Louisiana issued an RFI to identify solutions that can provide a technology platform for determining eligibility and managing cases across multiple human services programs.
It is necessary give the public servants who manage safety-net systems the technology tools and incentives to track critical outcomes and meet people where they are.
ACCESS NYC is an online public screening tool that residents can use to determine the City, State, and Federal health and human service benefit programs for which they are eligible.
In response to exploding demand for social services during COVID-19, the Louisiana Department of children and Family services implemented text-message alerts and reminders for the state’s entire SNAP caseload, launched a text-based public campaign to help people understand and apply for SNAP benefits, and hired SNAP recipients to provide client feedback on communications and policy decisions.
The Better Government Lab at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University has developed a new scale for measuring the experience of burden when accessing public benefits. They offer both a three-item scale and a single-item scale, which can be utilized for any public benefit program. The shorter scales provide a less burdensome way to measure by requiring less information from users.
