Increasing Access to Nutrition in Allegheny County

Partner(s): Allegheny County Department of Human Services, Just Harvest, Greater Pittsburgh Food Bank
Status: In progress
Team: Kasun Amarasinghe, Alice Lai, Rayid Ghani

Background

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) helps families in need purchase food, and currently, 1.88 million people receive SNAP benefits in Pennsylvania. The Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank (GPFCB) estimates that over 160,000 people suffer from food insecurity in Allegheny County. Food insecurity also disproportionately impacts children, with more than one in three children in the county eligible for SNAP benefits. While SNAP exists to reduce food insecurity in the country, many who qualify are not receiving benefits. The problem is particularly worrying for some populations. For example, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that take-up rates of SNAP among qualifying seniors are half that of the general population.

Scope

In this effort, we have partnered up with the ACDHS with a short-term aim of increasing the SNAP enrollment of individuals and households that qualify but are currently not utilizing the program. To achieve this, we are developing a data-driven system that identifies individuals who are likely to be eligible but are not receiving SNAP with a plan of supporting an outreach program administered by the ACDHS. In Oct-Dec 2020, ACDHS and GPFCB identified 36000 households that received public benefits but did not receive SNAP and conducted a postcard campaign. This campaign yielded a 9% increase in enrollment. By supporting more “high-touch” outreach efforts (e.g., personalized text messages and phone calls) with predictive analytics, we aim to improve the enrollment rate by 30%.

Data and Ongoing Work

In our current work, we are using regularly collected administrative data from ACDHS that capture various county and state government service interactions of individuals to build machine learning (ML) models that predict the likelihood of SNAP eligibility for an individual. Using these ML predictions, ACDHS and their community organization partners will conduct targeted outreach to support the enrollment of eligible individuals.