Technology Provides Access to Food Stamps

The recent downturn in the economy, and the ripple effect of 9/11, has left an increased number of New Yorkers vulnerable to hunger. However, only about fifty percent of New York City residents eligible for food stamps actually receive them. Greater participation in this federally funded program would reduce hunger, reduce reliance on welfare, decrease caseloads at emergency food and shelter programs, and bring jobs and millions of federal dollars to low-income neighborhoods.

FoodChange is part of a unique and innovative collaboration called the Food Card Access Project (FCAP) being sponsored by the United Way of New York City. This project is part of the United Way's Hunger Prevention Initiative and leverages the expertise of multiple community partners. One of the primary goals of FCAP is to increase active participation in the food stamp program. To accomplish this goal, the project wanted to move people further along in the application process at the time prescreening occurs, provide better reporting and monitoring capabilities and streamline the overall application process.

The United Way asked NPower NY to help determine the best approach to FoodChange's pre-screening activity, which is the primary means of identifying food stamp-eligible individuals and families. NPower NY was asked to develop a new, more efficient and user-friendly calculator application that can be used by FoodChange as well as five Community Based Organizations identified as pilots by United Way.

The new pre-screening application, architected and developed by Mission Research, is a standalone, Windows-based application that enables remote access to central server data and prints the completed Food Stamp application in the field. The new application combines screeners' databases via a nightly upload to a central United Way data store and exports data from the central database to an Excel spreadsheet for reporting and analysis purposes. In addition, it generates help screens and questions the screener should ask at the time of the screening interview.

17,421 Information packets were distributed about the project in the community 3,303 People have been pre-screened for the Food Stamp Program 852 Appointments have been scheduled with the city's Human Resource Administration to begin the Food Stamp enrollment process.

The next phase of the Food Access Card Project will make the new prescreening tool and training available to nonprofit agencies across the city. This will allow a much greater number of agencies to help their clients complete the Food Stamp Prescreening process.