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.
Government agencies at all levels collect administrative data in the course of their day-to-day operations. While such information has been used to determine effectiveness through program evaluations for many years, program administrators view it increasingly as a valuable resource that can also be used to improve program performance. For example, administrative data from employment and public benefits programs such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) can offer insights into families’ unmet needs and ways to improve services.
Working with TANF administrators and human services leaders across the country, the American Public Human Services Association (APHSA) embraces the call to reimagine how TANF can work in support of the families it serves and has established a set of TANF Modernization Core Principles to guide our vision for the future of TANF. Grounded in these Core Principles, APHSA’s members have laid out a legislative framework to unlock the potential of TANF. We call upon Congress to use this framework as a starting point to build common ground to achieve a TANF reauthorization that promotes a more equitable and prosperous future for all Americans.
American Public Human Services Association (APHSA)
SNAP Waivers and Adaptations During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Survey of State Agency Perspectives in 2020 is a study conducted by the Johns Hopkins Institute for Health and Social Policy (IHSP) based at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the American Public Human Services Association (APHSA). This research seeks to understand perspectives from state SNAP administrators on the successes, challenges, and lessons learned from waivers and flexibilities used to preserve equitable access to SNAP during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on state agency survey responses, this report summarizes key findings from the first calendar year of pandemic response and provides policy considerations for the future of SNAP. This research was supported by Healthy Eating Research, a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Johns Hopkins Institute for Health and Social Policy
This case study describes Nava's with the state of Montana’s Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) agency to build an eligibility screener tool.
This report outlines the U.S. Department of Labor’s comprehensive action plan to strengthen the unemployment insurance (UI) system by addressing chronic underfunding and proposing legislative reforms to support long-term modernization and resilience.
There is a key disconnect between policymakers’ intent and implementation of policies. A user-centric, iterative, and data-driven approach can result result in digital technology that provides much needed data and insights at a substantially lower cost.
A report that reviews what has been learned from guaranteed income pilot projects in Massachusetts and situates those findings within the broader national evidence base.
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)
This article explores innovative strategies to improve access to public benefits by reducing administrative barriers and leveraging technology for a more user-friendly experience.
Post-Medicaid continuous enrollment's end in March 2023, states faced renewal challenges through August 2024, seeing improved auto-renewals but persistent procedural disenrollments despite outreach and intervention.
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.
