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.
This report summarizes progress made with agencies and members of the public to identify and reduce burdens that individuals, families, and small businesses face every day when interacting with government programs.
This Urban Institute article argues that poverty is driven by structural barriers rather than individual choices and advocates for safety net programs that address systemic inequities.
This nine-minute video, produced after the completion of the TANF Data Collaborative (TDC) Pilot, features staff members from the California, Colorado, Minnesota, and Virginia TANF agencies reflecting on their challenges, accomplishments, and general experiences during the pilot. In particular, they describe their research questions and discuss building data capacity, integrating datasets, networking with other states, increasing collaboration between state and county agencies, learning new technical skills, and the benefits of being able to draw from diverse skillsets, all within the context of the TDC Pilot.
This resource allows policymakers, employers, benefits providers, and researchers assess benefits performance for constituents and identify opportunities in market and policy innovation to ensure equitable benefits distribution.
There is a key disconnect between policymakers’ intent and implementation of policies. A user-centric, iterative, and data-driven approach can result result in digital technology that provides much needed data and insights at a substantially lower cost.
This report evaluates state government websites for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), providing links to each state's site and assessing the information and services they offer.
This report describes C-Stat 2.0, an updated version of the the Colorado Department of Human Services’ performance-based analysis strategy that allows them to better focus on and improve performance outcomes that enhance people’s lives.
This playbook outlines the ways Community Action and human services agencies worked together to meet the pandemic challenge—what worked well, obstacles and difficulties, and lessons learned to inform the path forward, partnering to achieve a more equitable recovery. It also explains how communities have leveraged opportunities to partner on approaches that hold the promise of deeper, longer lasting changes for families—work shaped by families’ wishes and strengths and designed to advance both family-level and systems-level change.
American Public Human Services Association (APHSA)
This report examines how implementing Asset Verification Systems (AVS) can streamline Medicaid eligibility determinations for seniors and individuals with disabilities by automating the verification of applicants' financial assets.
This report outlines a dozen fintech and civic tech organizations working across fourteen safety net programs to show what’s possible when modern technology is married to a consumer insights perspective.
Though the rhetoric of “waste, fraud, and abuse” is ubiquitous when it comes to welfare programs, low-income households receive little relief from benefits programs. Most efforts to make public benefits systems more “efficient” actually just waste time and money in practice. They instead serve to stigmatize low-income families and chip away at the little assistance that remains available to them.
