When Charlotte Weiner talks about the gap between the government benefits available to low-income families and the funds actually claimed, she cites a number — a big one: more than $100 billion. “There is no good reason for public benefits to go unclaimed,” Weiner says. “But year over year, millions and millions of eligible low-income families aren’t receiving the benefits they deserve.”
Barriers range from lack of awareness of the available benefits to application processes that are lengthy and extremely hard to navigate. All this prevents essential funds from reaching people who need them most – those working to pay rent and medical bills, keep the lights on, and put food on the table.
Ensuring these families receive the assistance for which they are eligible is why Weiner founded Frontdoor Benefits. The company’s digital tools make it easier for qualified low-income Americans to access government benefits, unlocking vital financial resources.
It was while working in roles across public, private, and social sectors related to the social safety net in the United States that Weiner saw how silos between these sectors hampered efforts to develop comprehensive solutions.
“Historically, we’ve left social service delivery to government and relied on incredibly hard-working but frequently overstretched and underfunded community-based organizations to fill in the gaps,” she says. “I started to ask, ‘Why isn’t the private sector part of this conversation?’”
For Frontdoor Benefits, this means rethinking the experience of applying for and renewing benefits. Rather than attempting to change government processes or websites, Weiner and her co-founder Ben Sheldon started by building a simple, easy-to-use online application for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, also known as food stamps) in Connecticut. The application takes less than 10 minutes to complete, connects directly to existing government systems, and can be used on a mobile phone.
Meanwhile, because companies also benefit when communities are more financially stable — with more residents able to purchase food, for example — the team is developing a sustainable, scalable business model that differs from many nonprofit approaches, which rely on ongoing donations or pockets of tenuous public funding to survive. “We see an opportunity to activate private-sector incentives,” says Weiner.
The Problem
Included in the billions of dollars in benefits that go unclaimed every year is more than $45 billion in free or low-cost healthcare through Medicaid, more than $15 billion in food assistance through SNAP, and more than $10 billion in tax credits through the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).
For the one in eight Americans living in poverty, a complex web of obstacles often prevents them from accessing government benefits. First, many people are unaware that benefits exist and that they are eligible. Then, the stigma associated with applying for benefits may deter eligible Americans from signing up.
The application processes erect significant obstacles; for instance, the SNAP application process requires people to upload multiple verification documents online, to answer dozens of questions, and to complete a phone interview in an often narrow and inflexible timeframe. Furthermore, because government websites are not mobile-friendly, applying for benefits requires a computer with stable internet access.
While at the GSB, Weiner conducted dozens of interviews to deepen her understanding of the pain points people experience in accessing public benefits. She sat alongside families as they applied for benefits, and saw how frustrating and disempowering the application process can be. “The process feels like a very large ocean,” one woman told her. “I feel like I’m in a rowboat, trying to navigate. The waves come over you, and you’re just trying to make it.”
Nor does the burden end with the first application. Benefits such as SNAP expire, which means reapplying, creating another obstacle – particularly when administrative inefficiencies are added in. During her research, Weiner heard stories from families who had been cut off from benefits after moving apartments. Renewal reminders were mailed to their old addresses, so they missed re-application deadlines.
“There’s good work being done to tell people what benefits exist, and what they might be eligible for,” she explains. “But when families try to actually access the benefits, they hit dead end after dead end.”
The Solution
Frontdoor Benefits’s work is based on a model pioneered by Code for America, a national civic technology non-profit. Ten years ago, Code for America developed a tool called GetCalFresh to make it easier to apply for SNAP in California – it has helped more than 7 million people.
Last year, Weiner learned that GetCalFresh would be shutting down, despite its track record of impact. As she processed the news and talked with former coworkers and advisors from Code for America, she realized that her first product at Frontdoor could build on Code for America’s open source innovation, but with a funding model that could allow the work to scale over time.
It is no coincidence that her co-founder Sheldon, who is also Frontdoor’s chief technology officer, was a lead engineer on GetCalFresh, bringing a deep understanding of the problem on top of his technical expertise. Together, Weiner and Sheldon have hit the ground running, building Frontdoor’s first tool: a radically-simplified, mobile-friendly application for SNAP in Connecticut.
“The application we’ve built collects users’ information and, on the back-end, web-drives, auto-populates, and submits the application to the government website,” explains Weiner. “The roadmaps for updating many state websites are five or more years long. I loved being able to go back to my old boss, who is now Deputy Commissioner of Connecticut’s Department of Social Services, and telling him, ‘Hey, we can build a new application in eight weeks.’”
Safety net innovation also calls for business model innovation. The Frontdoor team is looking to private sector players that have a stake in increasing benefits enrollment. For instance, grocery stores benefit when people have more money to spend on food. Health plans save healthcare spend when their beneficiaries have better access to healthy food (in fact, research shows that the annual healthcare costs for a SNAP enrollee are $1,400 less than for an eligible unenrolled person). And utility companies benefit when people can pay their bills.
All this creates incentives for companies to partner with Frontdoor, says Weiner. “Given the scale of the problem, there’s a massive untapped opportunity,” she says.
This untapped opportunity has emboldened the Frontdoor team to set ambitious goals. Building on its first product — which provides a user-friendly entry point to apply for and renew SNAP benefits in Connecticut — the team plans to extend to other benefits programs in states across the US.
“We know the barriers folks face,” she says. “We want to build solutions that are clear, efficient, and designed with end-user needs and realities top of mind. By activating private sector payors, we can make the work sustainable and scalable.”
The Innovator
Weiner, who grew up outside Boston and studied Ethics, Politics, and Economics at Yale University, realized that she wanted to work to strengthen the social safety-net after graduating, when she moved across the country to California’s Central Valley and spent a year community organizing in rural farmworker communities with support from Yale’s Gordon Grand fellowship.
Many of the families she met in the Central Valley were deferring medical care despite being eligible for Medicaid; others had not signed up for benefits like food and utility assistance despite being eligible for enrollment. “I worked alongside folks who said their only safety net was their community,” she recalls. “I saw how benefits could mean food on the table, getting critical medical care, or keeping the lights on. By the end of the year, I knew this is what I wanted to work on.”
Realizing she wanted to work across sectors, Weiner moved back to the East Coast to work for two years as a consultant at Bain & Company, where she built up her knowledge of private sector incentives. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she left Bain to join an entrepreneurial cross-sector start-up to launch vaccination sites with Federally Qualified Health Centers in churches across New York City. While there, she developed a system connecting low-income residents to social services during their COVID-19 vaccination appointments.
It was during this experience that Weiner decided to gain work experience in the public sector to understand the benefits problem from the inside. While working for state leadership of the Department of Social Services as a Fellow in the Connecticut Governor’s Office, she built the online application for Connecticut’s low-income utility assistance program (LIHEAP). The experience and relationships Weiner gained in this role continue to play a role in her work.
Weiner’s experiences in community organizing, in business consulting, in a cross-sector start-up, in government, and now in building Frontdoor Benefits have left her with a powerful insight: that the most effective way of removing the barriers preventing access to social safety nets is to build bridges linking public, private, and social sector resources. “The solutions are close at hand,” she says. “We can turn dead ends into front doors.”
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