The new software solution, Government Assistance Program Intelligence, provides state and local government agencies, partners, and stakeholders with capabilities to access, map, and analyze critical data on food, rental, and housing-fund assistance
UrbanFootprint, provider of the world’s first urban intelligence platform, announced the launch of its new Government Assistance Program Intelligence (“Assistance Program Intelligence”) solution. An industry first, the solution empowers stakeholders overseeing the allocation of public assistance funds with actionable data to track and improve community outreach, identify enrollment gaps, and drive assistance program performance.
“UrbanFootprint’s Assistance Program Intelligence empowers government assistance stakeholders with a set of tools and data to distribute benefits to those in need more equitably, efficiently and effectively than ever before.”
Agencies that manage food, rental, and housing-fund assistance are constantly challenged with locating eligible and vulnerable households in their outreach efforts, monitoring program enrollment progress, and ultimately ensuring that benefits get to those in need. UrbanFootprint’s Assistance Program Intelligence helps to solve this problem by augmenting existing agency systems with ready-to-use insights on assistance program need, eligibility, and enrollment. Unlike traditional approaches to analyzing program performance and outreach, Assistance Program Intelligence takes a more holistic approach, combining risk and eligibility mapping with a program’s enrollment and operational data and other population factors. Intersecting these broadly-sourced and disparate datasets allows stakeholders to immediately improve outreach targeting, especially among disadvantaged and priority populations, and enable holistic program improvements—all through a simple and intuitive browser-based interface.
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“The federal government spent $114 billion on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and nearly $47 billion in eviction aid in 2021. But actually distributing that aid to the individuals and communities who need it most is surprisingly difficult,” said Joe DiStefano, CEO of UrbanFootprint. “UrbanFootprint’s Assistance Program Intelligence empowers government assistance stakeholders with a set of tools and data to distribute benefits to those in need more equitably, efficiently and effectively than ever before.”
Currently, Assistance Program Intelligence is being used by major state and local governments to target billions of dollars in food, housing, and disaster relief to vulnerable Americans. In California, the Local Initiatives Support Coalition (LISC), a non-profit community development institution designated by the state to implement its Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP), is leveraging UrbanFootprint to target application assistance for California’s $5 billion in rental assistance funding. And in Louisiana, the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), which oversees the state’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and other benefit programs, is using UrbanFootprint to support front-line teams and local partners in mapping and measuring need; then closing the gap between SNAP eligibility and enrollment, reducing food insecurity across the state. In part due to its work in this area, UrbanFootprint has been approved by the USDA as an official SNAP outreach provider, and is currently the first—and only—USDA technology partner.
Within Assistance Program Intelligence are three use-case focused products: Food Security Insights, Eviction Risk Insights, and Foreclosure Risk Insights, the first-ever dynamic data tools to track the scale and distribution of food insecurity, eviction, and foreclosure across the country. The products are unique in their ability to provide users with detailed and targeted insights into both prevalence and risk, identifying households in a given community currently experiencing these conditions—and those likely to in the near future. The tools dynamically unify, analyze, and map previously isolated datasets, including key demographic variables, for any area in the U.S. Among the insights provided are estimates of the number of households at risk down to the census-block-group level, which can then be aggregated to the neighborhood, city, zip code, county, congressional district, or state level. The ability to analyze and map at different levels of granularity enables program administrators to answer high-level planning questions and make informed policy decisions, while community-based partners can identify which outreach efforts work best, and plan more effective location-based outreach, direct application assistance, or paid media programs.