This week CalFresh Branch Chief Kim McCoy Wade detailed the work the government program (formerly known as Food Stamps) has been doing with Code for America to develop new ways for customers to access their benefits.
Code4Sac, the local chapter of Code for America, McCoy Wade at its monthly Hack Night on Wednesday evening at the Hacker Lab. McCoy Wade gave a shortened version of a speech she’ll deliver at the Code for America Summit in Oakland next month.
CalFresh provides $150 per person, per month, said McCoy Wade, but there’s often a disconnect between the application for benefits and the clients actually receiving benefits.
“We have had a serious access problem in California forever,” she said. McCoy Wade explained that there is a complicated three-step process to gaining the CalFresh benefits, including a confusing application, a lengthy verification and an in-person interview with a qualified CalFresh employee. Additionally, clients must re-verify their information every six months and completely re-apply every 12 months. “It’s just too hard to get and keep this benefit,” she said. “Most of our clients are too busy working.”
Code For America and CalFresh have been working to develop an application support site at www.getcalfresh.org, as well as a mobile platform for the application that’s “in plain English,” she said.
According to the Code For America website, “An online application is available in California, yet it can take up to an hour to complete, is more than 50 web pages long, and filled with over a hundred questions.” Most who start the application don’t finish it, and it also doesn't work on mobile devices, despite the fact that most low-income people rely on mobile devices for access to the Internet. (Watch a video of a CalFresh applicant using the online application.)
“We think the client of the future is applying online,” said McCoy Wade. “The mom is putting her kids to bed and at 11 o’clock at night, she’s reapplying online or on the phone.” She said the site is already being tested in Sacramento, Placer, San Francisco, Contra Costa, Solano, Marin and San Diego counties. McCoy Wade said her department is diligently tracking conversion rates to see how many clients who are using the online application service actually follow through with the full application, verification and interview steps.
Part of McCoy Wade’s talk focused on some of the lessons CalFresh has learned from working with the technology sector, and what the Code for America guests learned from working with government employees. Respect on both sides was obvious, she said, and CalFresh was able to learn procurement techniques from their guests, while the Code For America employees were able to see the deep diversity in government that doesn’t always exist in the tech sector.
Ultimately, McCoy Wade said, the goal is to simplify customer access, without intruding on the necessary requirements of the government application. Short resolution times and short answer rates were high on their list of goals, she said as well as trying to listen to the feedback from the eight test counties. “Clients aren’t my customer,” McCoy Wade said, “They are my end user. My customers are the 58 counties [of California.]”
For more information about the CalFresh program, visit http://www.calfresh.ca.gov/, and for more information about the work with Code For America, visit https://www.codeforamerica.org/featured-stories/counties-make-it-easy-to-apply-for-calfresh.
