For over a year, a team at Code for Boston has been developing an app to calculate public benefit "cliffs." Code for Boston's cliff effects app was built in partnership with UMass Boston's Center for Social Policy, Project Hope, and the On Solid Ground Coalition. During that partnership, we built a prototype app that calculates cliff effects for Section 8 and SNAP benefits. We have tested the app with case managers from Project Hope and have demoed the app to policy stakeholders.
The cliff effects app was originally intended as a tool for case managers to help their clients better understand how changes in income might change their benefits. Currently the project has implemented, as much as possible, what the project partners requested:
- Calculations (non-validated) for two public assistance programs:
- Section 8 Housing Voucher
- SNAP
- A form for case managers to fill in with their clients.
- Output of calculation results made based on client data.
Our partners also told us to only account for some of the regulations. For example, their case managers don't work with a lot of students, so we were told not to account for income limits created for students.
The output we've created includes both a text summary for the client to print and graphs that show how the net income of someone with the client's data can change as their earnings change, going from $0/year to $100,000/year.
You can see the demo at https://codeforboston.github.io/cliff-effects/.
You can see and try the volunteer-developed code at https://github.com/codeforboston/cliff-effects.
Unfortunately, neither the Center for Social Policy nor Project Hope have the resources to continue a partnership to actively develop the app. Without access to people who understand the different public benefits -- subject matter experts -- we won't be able to add any more benefits to the tool.
We believe that our cliff effects app can serve as a model for integrating other benefits into a calculator. Since these benefits are administered by federal and state offices, government partners are ideal.
Edits to 1-pager.