Service Delivery Area: Benefits
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MNbenefits Demo Site
Demo website for MNbenefits, Minnesota's benefits application that allows applicants to finish an application in 20 minutes or less.
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A Playbook for Improving Unemployment Insurance Delivery
A playbook by New America describing lessons learned from past recessions, recent pandemic-inspired innovations, and complementary benefit spaces like SNAP and WIC.
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Improving Public Programs for Low-Income Tax Filers
To inform future efforts to bring more low-income tax filers into the tax system, this report focuses on the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program and investigates the challenges and opportunities to better serve the American people and improve the experience of tax filing.
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Digitizing Policy + Rules as Code Removing Barriers: Public Benefits and Voter Registration
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.
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Policy The IRS as a Benefits Administrator
The IRS is arguably the single most critical benefits administrator in the country, given its responsibility for tax credit-based relief programs, and COVID-19 relief payments. Despite these programs’ incredible progress in reducing poverty, and despite great strides by the IRS to implement them successfully, accessing IRS benefits remains too difficult for many low-income families. This report presents a comprehensive agenda to increase benefit coverage rates, simplify Americans’ interactions with the IRS, and decrease the portion of IRS benefits diverted to third parties.
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Filing Taxes for Economic Justice
At the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, CodeforAmerica rapidly scaled up GetYourRefund, allowing filers to quickly and simply file their taxes in order to get refunds they were eligible for.
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The Cash Assistance Implementation Playbook
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.
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Human-Centered Design Design in the Public Sector: Toward a Human Centered Model of Public Governance
This paper analyses 15 cases of design in the public sector to arrive at a theoretical characterization of design in the public sector that aligns with descriptions in non-public settings. It also considers public design practices might signal the emergence of human-centered models of public governance that counterbalance more bureaucratic and analytical traditions.
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Human-Centered Design How to begin designing for diversity
In order to create for all, we have to employ processes that authentically engage misrepresented communities. People tend to think of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in terms of implicit bias workshops, employee resource groups, and hiring processes. These efforts are all important, but it is also necessary to focus on DEI as it relates to the creation of products, services, and content, and use a design-thinking approach to tackle these tricky issues.
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Human-Centered Design Calling all stakeholders: Group-level assessment (GLA)—A qualitative and participatory method for large groups
Group-level assessment (GLA) is a qualitative and participatory large group method in which timely and valid data are collaboratively generated and interactively evaluated with relevant stakeholders leading to the development of participant-driven data and relevant action plans. This article describes the methodological development and process of conducting a GLA and its various applications across the evaluation spectrum.
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Procurement Make RFPs More Equitable
A Request For Proposals (RFP) is a document describing a project that needs an outside business to complete. Clear, concise RFPs are necessary to attract potential talent, in addition to making the process more equitable and efficient. This article provides several suggestions on improving an organization’s RFP.
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Human-Centered Design Configuring participation: on how we involve people in design.
This paper explores three important questions for understanding how HCI configures participation; Who initiates, directs and benefits from user participation in design? In what forms does user participation occur? How is control shared with users in design? In answering these questions, the authors consider the conceptual, ethical and pragmatic problems this raises for current participatory HCI research. Finally, they offer directions for future work explicitly dealing with the configuration of participation.