EVALUATION OF NEW YORK CITY FOOD STAMP PAPERLESS APPLICATION DEMONSTRATION
Project: EVALUATION OF NEW YORK CITY FOOD STAMP PAPERLESS APPLICATION DEMONSTRATION
Sponsor: New York City Human Resources Administration with grant funds from the U.S. De-partment of Agriculture, Food, and Nutrition Service
IPS Staff: Demetra Smith Nightingale, Burt Barnow, and Jonathan Pollak
Purpose and Approach
New York City’s Human Resources Administration (HRA) administers cash assistance and food stamp programs in the city. The agency is piloting a new outreach and application strategy. Nonprofit organi-zations, under contract from HRA, conduct mobile outreach to specified target populations potentially eligible for food stamps (e.g., disabled individuals, recipients of Supplemental Security Income, and low-income working recipients), enter preliminary application and verification information electroni-cally into a newly-developed management data system, and arrange for formal application with HRA employees. The pilot is operating in five HRA model centers.
A non-experimental evaluation design is being used to measure basic program outcomes and document implementation of the program. The evaluation is primarily concerned with determining operational outcomes (e.g., application rate, enrollment rate by target group, error rates) of the outreach initiative within HRA and in the context of the surrounding nonprofit community. The basic model involves measuring the quantifiable outcomes for each of the five model HRA centers participating in the initia-tive, and (1) analyzing the change and trends over time and (2) comparing the trends and changes in the outcomes in the model centers to the trends and changes observed for cases facilitated by the com-munity-based organizations to those processed only through HRA food stamp centers..
Results
There are some promising findings about the role of the community-based organizations in facilitating enrollment into food stamps, particularly in terms of processing a higher proportion of eligible persons who had not previously received benefits and a higher proportion of eligible persons who were working or usually worked.
Publications
Nightingale, D.S., B.S. Barnow, J. Pollak, and M. Maraonick (2009). “Evaluation of the New York City Food Stamps Paperless Office System’s Community Based Organization Pilot” Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, Institute for Policy Studies.
