Michigan's UIA director, Julia Dale, is leading the agency through transition by prioritizing lived experience, hope, grit, and values. Virginia's SNAP Program Manager, Michele Thomas, highlighted the success of Sun Bucks, a summer EBT child nutrition program that fed over 700,000 kids in its first year.
The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Data Collaborative Pilot Initiative is a component of the TANF Data Innovation project. The 30-month pilot offered technical assistance and training to support cross-disciplinary teams of staff at eight state and county TANF programs in the routine use of TANF and other administrative data to inform policy and practice.
This report outlines how modernizing unemployment insurance (UI) technology with a worker-centered approach can improve access, efficiency, and equity in the UI system.
The Pandemic Electronic Benefits Transfer (P-EBT) program was launched as an effort to address the loss of access to free and reduced-price school meals due to widespread school closures at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. As schools reopened in a shifting mix of fully virtual, hybrid, and inperson formats and families lacked consistent access to school meals, these benefits were extended through the 2020–21 school year and were highly valuable to families in buffering the full extent of food insecurity they may have faced during this uncertain time. However, the complexity of administering this program was a fundamental barrier in providing timely support to families, who ultimately went without benefits for at least half of the school year. In this report, we dive into the challenges state administrators faced in launching this new program during the 2020–21 school year and reflect on considerations for the future.
This report details the use of the historic investment of $1 billion in funding from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) to the Department of Labor and state unemployment (UI) agencies to modernize state UI programs.
The Lost in the Labyrinth brief examines how fragmented early care and education (ECE) programs across the U.S. create challenges for families seeking services for young children.
This report explores the financial challenges faced by U.S. workers, analyzing the roles of work arrangements and public and workplace benefits in achieving financial security, while highlighting the disparities in access and effectiveness for low- and moderate-income workers.
This Urban Institute report explores the impact of benefit cliffs, plateaus, and trade-offs on families receiving public assistance, examining how changes in earnings affect access to essential benefits like SNAP, Medicaid, and housing subsidies.
A recent study challenges the common belief that income support programs like SNAP reduce employment, finding that for individuals with a work history, receiving SNAP benefits can actually increase long-term employment.
This report examines how states strategically approached managing and administering the historic influx of COVID-19 relief funds for child care and early childhood systems, focusing on governance structures, funding management systems, and data systems
