GetCalFresh

Thousands of children are missing meals, and their families are forced to choose between groceries or bills and rent every day. What’s more, nearly 270,000 kids in the Bay Area are eligible for food assistance but not enrolled. SNAP, federal food assistance called CalFresh in California, is the largest anti-hunger program in the country. It is one of the most successful government interventions in alleviating poverty, and correlates highly with better health and educational outcomes for kids. It is also incredibly difficult to access. That’s why Code for America created GetCalFresh, a service to get families the food they need quickly and with dignity. GetCalFresh distills the complex food assistance application to only the questions necessary to attain benefits while providing multilingual text support for clients through each step of the enrollment process. We work closely with our government partners, who use the data to foster better outcomes for users and lower costs for government.

Code for America believes that government programs can be easy to access, cost less to administer, and provide real-time data about outcomes. We build easy-to-use digital services that improve the delivery of government programs. We acquire our own users, and support them via text message as they interact with government systems. We document the administrative barriers they face in applying for and using these systems. We then work closely with government partners, who use the data to foster better outcomes for users and lower costs for government. We call this methodology “apps to ops,” underscoring the program’s impact on government operations and policy. GetCalFresh is proving that a user-centered, iterative, and data-driven approach can transform the public’s relationship with government. Since we track individual user data, we can identify failure points in the CalFresh application process in ways our government partners have never been able to before. For example, we were able to identify an attachment feature that silently failed clients for three years—resulting in 100,000 to 250,000 wrongfully denied cases that cost families $9,000,000 in food assistance. We then work with counties to create solutions that impact policy and implementation. Our work has been so effective that the State of California contracted with us making GetCalFresh the first ever digital SNAP outreach provider.

Vision

SNAP Enrollment for the 21st Century

Code for America envisions a world where governments have the tools they need to serve food-insecure families effectively and with respect. We believe in a world in which government responds to its peoples' needs, helps communities thrive and is as easy to access as the best customer services.

Code for America

Model and Strategy

Impact

Leadership

Jen Pahlka

Lou Moore

ST Mayer