The NYC Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity (NYC Opportunity) developed the NYC Benefits Platform, including ACCESS NYC, to help residents easily discover and check eligibility for over 80 social programs. This mobile-first, open-source tool uses a simple eligibility screener, reducing access barriers while allowing integration with other city services like MyCity, ensuring efficient access to benefits.
The design system for NYC Opportunity's digital products. It is ideally suited for building catalogs of City services and online applications, providing simple and flexible CSS and JavaScript-based components and utilities for building user interfaces quickly and easily.
At Rules as Code Demo Day we heard from Song Hia of the NYC Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity and Ethan Lo of the NYC Office of Technology and Innovation who demoed the NYC Benefits Platform Screening API which provides machine-readable calculations and criteria for benefits screening that power the ACCESS NYC screening questionnaire. This makes it easier for NYC residents to discover multiple benefits they may be eligible for. The City is now extending the API to support the new MyCity platform, a one-stop shop for all services and benefits.
This overview journey map of street homeless outreach reflects the complexity of the service journey from first contact on street to placement in permanent housing.
This overview journey map of street homeless outreach reflects the business process, and worker and client experience during the period January–April 2016 from initial observation, contact, case management, and placement in permanent housing. The map is displayed in eleven high-level sections, each with individual sub-level sections. Summaries and details for all the sections are presented in the subsequent pages. Each dot represents an individual or agency. Each cluster of dots represents a service interaction.
Complex benefits information creates unnecessary barriers for residents and navigators who must understand what’s relevant to them so they can receive benefits. For non-native English speakers, these barriers are exacerbated. This resource guide outlines approaches for translating content to improve equitable access to benefits.
Creating content that is easily accessible for social safety net benefit applicants and recipients can require a range of expertise and input from policy experts, communications leads, designers, and software developers. However, this task need not be as daunting as it seems. This guide discusses general characteristics shared by organizations that have successfully created accessible content, and includes case studies that showcase characteristics of successful accessible content teams.
The right tech frameworks can help organize and distribute accessible benefits information, both within your organization and beyond. This primer introduces two foundational software types that can support organizations that are committed to accessible benefits information: content management systems (CMS) and application program interfaces (APIs). It also provides examples of how one local government leveraged these tools to improve services and workstreams.
As family’s earnings rise, those earnings increases are often offset by declines in public assistance benefits (commonly called “benefit cliffs” when the declines are sharp) and increases in taxes owed. At the same time, refundable tax credits—which offset taxes owed and are delivered as a tax refund—can boost income. These interactions can be confusing and make it difficult for parents to anticipate how increasing their work hours, hourly wage rate, or both will affect their benefits, taxes, and income to support their families. This study estimates what happens to benefits and taxes when earnings increase and also explores how people perceive public benefit interactions, trade-offs, and benefit cliffs as they increase their work hours or earn higher wages.
New America’s New Practice Lab is directing research with the aim to increase the money in the pockets of low-income families by enhancing service delivery in federal programs that help families. To address this challenge in one specific state, the New Practice Lab partnered with the New York Department of Taxation and Finance (NYSDTF) team to understand the factors that present challenges to the administration of the EITC. The team highlights recommendations and learnings from its research in this article.
