This fact sheet describes a study demonstrating that Benefits Data Trust’s Outreach and Application Assistance increased SNAP participation more than seven-fold, reducing Medicaid spending and improving health in North Carolina.
Nava partnered with the State of California’s Employment Development Department to build and deploy two digital services to assist Californians seeking unemployment benefits, in just three months.
The GetCalFresh team, the California Department of Social Services, and the California Secretary of State’s office worked together to create a simplified, accessible voter registration experience with clients. When people come to GetCalFresh.org, they are looking to apply for food assistance, so the state of California did not want voter registration to become an obstacle to the goal of getting food assistance. Thus, rather than directing clients to anther website, they offered to text clients a link to the CA Secretary of State’s voter website with directions on how to register.
In response to the COVID-19 crisis, the federal government authorized a new emergency program, Pandemic EBT (P-EBT), to replace school meals with money for groceries while schools are closed. Code for America describes its efforts to launch an accessible, online P-EBT application under an accelerated timeline due to to immense demand caused by the pandemic.
Integrating eligibility and enrollment benefits is an increasingly important undertaking for state governments around the country. However, states already in the process of integrating benefits are encountering an issue: differing and contradictory submission requirements dictated by the federal agencies running these benefits programs. Aligning these fragmented requirements is necessary to build a truly human-centered process for state benefits programs.
The purpose of this document is to outline possible technical approaches to supporting a cash assistance program. The report aims to both capture individual approaches as well as overarching insights taken from across the approaches taken by different organizations.
United Way Worldwide and New America’s New Practice Lab are currently partnering for a three month design sprint to identify how to make quality, free tax assistance more accessible to low income filers. This report explores how “Facilitated Self-Assistance,” where eligible filers file their own taxes online with assistance provided by IRS volunteers, can help increase accessibility to tax assistance and allow families to access benefits they are owed.
Rent relief distribution in 2020 was slow and inequitable, because local programs instituted strict eligibility criteria beyond what was required by the CARES Act. As a result of these hurdles, incomplete applications were a major barrier to distributing funds. This report describes the rent relief challenges during the pandemic, as well as a few possible fixes to help the next round of aid distribution.
The BenePhilly SNAP Demonstration Project (henceforth “BenePhilly”) represents an innovative and successful approach to streamlining access to public benefits. It sought to increase participation in SNAP among eligible senior households in Philadelphia by utilizing existing state and federal data to reach seniors who are likely eligible for, but not participating in, SNAP, as well as simplify the SNAP application and enrollment process. This report summarizes preliminary findings from BenePhilly’s 18 months of operation (June 2010–December 2011).
GuardRails is an experimental new approach to streamline the annual SNAP recertification process by leveraging targeted text messaging and automated voice messages in multiple languages to “nudge” people at the right time with the right information to help them through the recertification process.
Code for America describes its work building GetCTC, an e-filer that allows people to file simplified tax returns as specified in the revenue procedure required for the Child Tax Credit.
The CARES Act and Families First Coronavirus Response Act failed to reach millions of non-tax-filing Americans with low incomes and deliberately excluded undocumented immigrants, leaving entire communities without recourse. Disaster Relief Assistance for Immigrants (DRAI) was a crucial program by the state of California for undocumented immigrants, and the California Department of Social Services partnered with Code for America to build a digital portal that would support community-based organizations in taking applications, tracking the various steps in the process, and activating clients’ $500 bank cards.
