A woman who called 211 Colorado last month said she had already applied for help through two food assistance programs and inquired about other public benefits she could qualify for.
“She was a single mom who was pregnant and needed financial assistance for her baby,” said Abigail Jimenez, the 211 operator at Mile High United Way who answered the woman’s call.
Jimenez told the mother about MyFriendBen, a new online tool that could help her find other social services she may be eligible for.
The new tool, recently launched by Gary Community Ventures, a nonprofit philanthropy group, aims to ensure Coloradans in need can better access some of the most basic necessities such as food and heat through existing public benefits programs.
The idea is to help people determine what they might be eligible for in about 6 minutes on average, Gary Community Ventures leaders said.
The tool, which appears to be the first of its kind in Colorado, streamlines the navigation process for human services workers by helping them guide people through screening questions on the MyFriendBen site instead of a time-consuming search through a cumbersome database, Jimenez said.
“The main intent is to increase access to the social safety net because people are eligible for benefits but are not getting what they’re eligible for and what’s already publicly funded,” said Elise Henson, executive director for MyFriendBen at Gary Community Ventures.
In early 2022, Gary leaders met with about 100 families who were giving feedback about other initiatives the organization had created such as how to improve its tutoring program and expand its school enrichment program.
During the meetings, Gary leaders asked participants about their experience with public benefits.
Many people said they didn’t know what benefits programs they could qualify for and they became frustrated by the time-intensive process of researching complex eligibility rules for the many different assistance programs.
Gary Community Ventures leaders said they were eager to address the access problem.
If everyone who is eligible was enrolled in the seven largest benefit programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and the programs were fully funded, poverty would drop by 37% for Black families and by 43% for Latino families, according to the Urban Institute, according to the Urban Institute.
In 2018, 79% of eligible people participated in SNAP in Colorado, according to most recent data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
“There’s a lot of money being left on the table, and at the same time, we’re hearing from families about all these different struggles in their everyday lives that could at least be mitigated in part by some of this additional cash in their pockets,” Henson said.
It can take months to train case managers and others who help people navigate public benefits on the rules of just one assistance program, said Brian Hiatt, vice president of technology at Gary Community Ventures.
“As a navigator, that means you usually are stuck just supporting them with their immediate task or the one or two programs that you know really well,” he said.
That makes it difficult for case managers to give people who need a lot of help a “quick and sizable” view of how several benefits programs might affect their household, he said.
When a person uses the MyFriendBen website, the tool predicts whether they might be eligible for more than 40 federal, state and county benefits programs.
Gary leaders add new benefits programs to MyFriendBen regularly and they’ll soon add an application preparation list to the site that outlines key documents people will need when they apply for programs they might qualify for.
MyFriendBen managers said the tool is important because it can help people who move between cities or counties quickly determine how their eligibility might change.
“Being discharged from a hospital, if you had a large bill, you lost your job, you just had a baby — these are the types of moments where people are coming to this tool to find and get access to critical safety net resources,” Hiatt said.
“People need help in certain moments and that tends to be the times when they will use a tool like this to quickly understand where they might start on that journey.”
The median household size for MyFriendBen users is two people and the median annual income for all users is just over $8,200.
The screening questions are short and written at a middle school reading level in 10 languages so far.
The questions do not inquire about personally identifiable information or citizenship status. But they do ask about disability status, income, household expenses, geographic location, age, number of people in the household and health insurance, for example.
At the end of the questionnaire, people who may be eligible for benefits will see an estimated monthly value in money and tax credits. The results also include a short description of how long it might take to apply.
Over the last few weeks, more Coloradans have been utilizing MyFriendBen.
In all of 2023, almost 5,500 Colorado households were screened, meaning the tool identified about $30 million available through public benefits programs for those people. Henson said based on the results of data about those early users, clients were able to access an estimated $5 million in benefits.
In December alone, 1,300 people used the MyFriendBen website, she said.
There was little awareness about programs that help people pay phone bills such as the Affordable Connectivity Program and Lifeline and many who learned about it during the pilot portion of the MyFriendBen program applied.
As Coloradans inch through winter, MyFriendBen leaders expect more people to apply for heating and utility assistance through the state’s Low-Income Energy Assistance Program, for example, which is receiving a record number of applications this season.
MyFriendBen leaders are also working with the human services department in Jefferson County, which has embedded the tool on its website.
MyFriendBen leaders are also partnering with the Village Exchange Center, a community center supporting immigrants and refugees. Many of the center’s clients are recent immigrants with no annual income and the MyFriendBen website is used there to help them find more support.
Other partner organizations have published the MyFriendBen link on their website. Gary leaders are also doing outreach to families through advertisements on Google and in modest mail efforts and television ads to help spread awareness about the platform.
About half of all MyFriendBen users in an early pilot study said they planned to apply for a new benefit program after using the tool.
And now about a year and a half after it launched, a local philanthropic organization and a civic tech organization in North Carolina are creating a similar version of the tool for their state that will launch during the fall.
Early on in their creative process, MyFriendBen leaders looked for other similar tools and found one, Access NYC, created by the New York Mayor’s Office of Economic Opportunity. The online tool helps people screen for benefits program eligibility, learn how to apply, gather required documents and find local support.
Access NYC helped Gary Community Ventures leaders quickly create their own similar MyFriendBen tool, they said.
“These programs can meaningfully reduce poverty and have all sorts of effects on education and health,” Henson said.
“And the reason that folks aren’t accessing benefits should not be because they don’t know about them or they don’t think they’re eligible,” she said. “There’s a lot of complexity across these systems but making sure people know what’s there and that it might be relevant for their household feels like one of the easier things to address and it can make a huge difference and affect a household’s monthly expenses and pocketbook.”