NSF Award
2322214
Nearly 20% of children under age five in the US live in poverty. To support these children, the US government funds various social safety-net programs to provide nutrition, healthcare, early childhood education, and additional income for families. Research on many of these programs demonstrates long-term academic, health, and economic benefits to participating children. However, these programs, which are administered at the state and local levels, are divided among multiple agencies, resulting in separate, and typically cumbersome, application processes. Information on programs and eligibility is neither centrally located nor easily findable, and application portals are often clumsy, confusing, duplicative, and outdated. These usability problems can hinder participation in beneficial programs. Without targeted efforts to simplify and streamline the application process for families, many young children in poverty are unlikely to receive all the benefits of the critical health and education programs for which they are eligible. To address this issue, this project will develop a streamlined application portal for Louisiana families, in which they can apply for multiple programs that support low-income children without duplicating efforts. <br/><br/>This project's aims are to improve and streamline the benefits application process for Louisiana families and to increase enrollment rates in participating programs. The team achieves these aims by building on current efforts to improve user experiences in Louisiana’s SNAP application. This award enables a new pilot SNAP application, which will offer randomly selected eligible families the option to automatically send their SNAP application information and documents to Louisiana WIC and to New Orleans Public Schools’ early childhood education programs. Through this randomized design, this project can identify the causal effects of the streamlined application on application rates to WIC and early childhood education programs. Interviews with local agency leaders and stakeholders will identify the necessary elements to develop and maintain a streamlined application at scale.<br/><br/>The CIVIC Innovation Challenge is a collaboration with Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security, and the National Science Foundation.<br/>This project is jointly funded by CISE-CIVIC INNOVATION, SBE-S&CC, the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), and Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
