The program pulled from the expertise of community organizations and technologists from Google.org to design new digital tools to address the challenges facing constituents.
The webinar discussion was part of The Opportunity Project for Cities series, hosted by Georgetown University's Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation, and featured four counties and two cities from across the country.
For Miami-Dade County,the challenge the county focused on for its presentation centered around the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), a federally funded program that helps low-income families pay for essential services like cooling and heating their homes.
To apply for LIHEAP, residents needed to fill out a physical application at their local community center. Panelists said many residents struggled with this process, ultimately resulting in fewer families receiving assistance and increasing their risk of service termination.
To address this, the county is working with Google.org to develop a new application to meet the following objectives:
- Increase residents’ application success rate
- Reduce strain on frontline staff
- Increase residents’ trust in LIHEAP
One way the app will achieve this is by offering an enhanced eligibility pre-screening process to inform residents about their program eligibility status before they go to a community center to apply.
The app will also offer an ID extraction tool that allows residents to use a copy of their government-issued ID to automatically fill out various portions of LIHEAP applications. Similarly, the app will offer document-scanning capabilities, so residents can scan and upload all their documents directly into their application packet.
“By December, the Google team will finish their work and transition the application over to us, and then the Miami-Dade County team will take it from there,” said Jorge Valens, an innovation manager from the county’s IT department.
More information about applying for LIHEAP in Miami-Dade County can be found online.
