Library
Discover the latest innovations, learn about promising practices, and find out what’s coming next with best-in-class resources from trusted sources.
Is there something missing from our library?
Search for the topic or resource you're looking for, or use the filters to narrow down results below.
-
Summer EBT Implementation Toolkit
The following documents serve as a resource to assist states, tribal organizations, and territories in preparing to implement Summer EBT in 2024.
-
Policy An Updated Measure of Poverty: ReDrawing the Line
This report recommends updating the methodology used by the Census Bureau to calculate the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) to reflect household basic needs and replace the current Official Poverty Measure as the primary statistical measure of poverty. The report assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the SPM and provides recommendations for updating its methodology and expanding its use in recognition of the needs of most American families such as medical care, childcare, and housing costs.
-
Automation + AI AI-Powered SNAP Modernization
This report explores how AI is currently used, and how it might be used in the future, to support administrative actions that agency staff complete when processing customers’ SNAP cases. In addition to desk and primary research, this brief was informed by input from APHSA’s wide network of state, county, and city members and national partners in the human services and related sectors.
-
Diversity, Equity + Inclusion How to Improve Unemployment Insurance for People with Disabilities
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.
-
Digitizing Policy + Rules as Code Exposing Error in Poverty Management Technology: A Method for Auditing Government Benefits Screening Tools
This paper introduces a method for auditing benefits eligibility screening tools in four steps: 1) generate test households, 2) automatically populate screening questions with household information and retrieve determinations, 3) translate eligibility guidelines into computer code to generate ground truth determinations, and 4) identify conflicting determinations to detect errors.
-
Automation + AI Envisioning a Human-AI collaborative system to transform policies into decision models
This paper introduces the problem of semi-automatically building decision models from eligibility policies for social services, and presents an initial emerging approach to shorten the route from policy documents to executable, interpretable and standardised decision models using AI, NLP and Knowledge Graphs. There is enormous potential of AI to assist government agencies and policy experts in scaling the production of both human-readable and machine executable policy rules, while improving transparency, interpretability, traceability and accountability of the decision making.
-
Digitizing Policy + Rules as Code Shared Values/Conflicting Logics: Working Around E-Government Systems
This paper describes results from fieldwork conducted at a social services site where the workers evaluate citizens' applications for food and medical assistance submitted via an e-government system. These results suggest value tensions that result - not from different stakeholders with different values - but from differences among how stakeholders enact the same shared value in practice.
-
Digitizing Policy + Rules as Code Rules as Code Frameworks and Tools
There are frameworks available that could inform the standardization of communicating rules as code for U.S. public benefits programs. The Airtable communicates the differences between the frameworks and tools. Each entry is tagged with different categories that identify the type of framework or tool it is.
-
Automation + AI A list of open LLMs
These LLMs (Large Language Models) are all licensed for commercial use (e.g., Apache 2.0, MIT, OpenRAIL-M).
-
Digitizing Policy + Rules as Code Cross-Sector Insights From the Rules as Code Community of Practice
In this report, the Digital Benefits Network shares learnings from the Rules as Code Community of Practice. Insights are grouped along core themes expressed by cross-sector practitioners, including complexity in policies, interest in sharing knowledge, tools, and code, the need for more training and technical assistance, and willingness to collaborate on an open standard for writing rules and developing a shared code library.
-
Diversity, Equity + Inclusion Opportunities to Improve Online Access to SNAP for Older Adults
This issue brief illustrates the challenges that many older adults with low income face in gaining access to benefits online. It addresses digital literacy, access to broadband internet, and the increasing prevalence of connecting online to SNAP.
-
Diversity, Equity + Inclusion Increasing Older Adult Access to SNAP
This brief highlights the complex journey that older adults experience when applying for and enrolling in SNAP, including the major barriers and solutions that improve access along the way.