The Digital Benefit Network's Digital Identity Community of Practice held a session to hear considerations from civil rights technologists and human-centered design practitioners on ways to ensure program security while simultaneously promoting equity, enabling accessibility, and minimizing bias.
In response to COVID-19, the Workers Lab and Steady developed the "Income Passport" to streamline gig workers' unemployment benefit applications by pulling income data directly from gig platforms and financial accounts. This tool reduced manual verification time, helped prevent fraud, and improved workers' access to full benefits, with successful tests in Alabama and Louisiana demonstrating significant time savings and improved service delivery.
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.
Webinar that shares Nava’s partnership with the Gates Foundation and the Benefits Data Trust that seeks to answer if generative and predictive AI can be used ethically to help reduce administrative burdens for benefits navigators.
A catalogue to help teams design trustworthy services that work for people. Categories including informing decisions, signing into services, giving and removing consent, and doing security checks.
Inclusive design means making design choices that take into account personal identifiers like ability, race, economic status, language, age, and gender. This resource walks folks through an introduction to inclusive design, focusing on accessibility and equity.
This brief outlines research recommendations to better understand and improve income support and employment services for low-income and at-risk LGBT populations.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
An overview of current technology systems used by WIC agencies nationwide, highlighting trends, challenges, and opportunities for modernization to improve program efficiency and participant experience.
This cheat sheet helps job seekers translate private-sector technology roles and skills into equivalent U.S. government job classifications and titles.
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.
To assist states in closing digital skill gaps and preparing for digital equity planning, this brief offers key questions and resources for state leaders to consider.
This HuffPost article investigates the widespread failures of state unemployment websites during the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting outdated technology, accessibility issues, and the human impact of these systemic breakdowns.
