After the abrupt closure of Benefits Data Trust, Philly nonprofits are stepping up to fill in the gaps

This story was originally published in the Philadelphia Citizen, and reposted in partnership with the Philadelphia Journalism Collaborative, a coalition of more than 25 local newsrooms, including Technical.ly, doing solutions reporting on things that affect daily life where the problem and symptoms are obvious, but what’s driving them isn’t. Follow at @PHLJournoCollab.

On a windy afternoon in November, a busload of seniors arrives on a verdant campus in West Oak Lane. Passing by persimmon trees and a koi pond, they enter a building with an array of services and activities, everything from health care and vocational training to bingo and mahjong.

These grounds belong to the nonprofit Penn Asian Senior Services, better known as PASSi. Founded in 2004, the organization’s core mission remains the same as it was 20 years ago: providing culturally attuned care for Asian American elders, many of whom have little English proficiency.

Over time, PASSi — which began with a small storefront in Jenkintown — has grown to encompass more and more. In January, the organization began a contract with the PA Department of Human Services to work on behalf of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — a government benefit (formerly known as food stamps) that provides additional grocery money for low-income families. “It’s been a chance for us to embrace new modalities with our [government] benefits assistance,” says Ken Yang, PASSi’s CEO, “although it’s been under unfortunate circumstances.”

What he’s referring to is one of the reasons why I’m there in the first place: the sudden, shocking closures of two nonprofits in the area — the Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger and Benefits Data Trust (BDT) — earlier this year. They were two of the largest drivers of SNAP applications in the state.

This came at a particularly bad time: No state in the country saw food prices soar as much as Pennsylvania, and no city more than Philadelphia, in 2023. Over the last several months, PASSi has stretched itself in new ways to fill those gaps. They hired multiple enrollment specialists formerly with BDT and inherited a multilingual SNAP hotline that used to reside at the Coalition.

“It’s an opportunity to work deeper, and on a larger scale, with DHS, but also to expand our reach, especially with remote services assistance,” says Yang.

Navigating the landscape of public benefits and the agencies administering them can be a befuddling maze. It’s one reason that an estimated $450 million is left on the table each year by Philadelphians alone. Losing any organization that’s dedicated to simplifying enrollment comes with the risk of letting more people slip through the cracks. The loss of BDT, however, felt exceptional.

“BDT helped tens of thousands of households enroll in SNAP, and once those people qualified for SNAP, the organization was able to identify other benefits they qualified for, too,” says Kristin Romens, director of The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Fund for Health and Human Services. “The loss of BDT has a cascading effect.”

One of the calling cards of BDT’s work was the concept of a “navigator” — a person with expertise in the often-changing landscape of local, state, and federal benefits, who could do more than just file paperwork. Navigators are adept problem solvers, helping Philadelphians to better understand their benefits choices, and in cases where they lacked eligibility, connecting them with community-based organizations that might address those needs in other ways.

The good news is that work is continuing even without BDT.

BDT partners build out continued support

There’s a host of reasons why people don’t get the government benefits they’re entitled to: language barriers and lack of translation; not knowing programs exist or assuming they’re not meant for them. Some enrollments require in-person visits (which require time and energy). Then there’s the psychological barriers, including cultural stigmas and the anxiety of being denied access.

BDT was established to overcome some of those challenges. Before closing, the Philly-based nonprofit earned a bevy of national accolades for its tech-forward approach to benefits work. In 2022, MacKenzie Scott awarded the nonprofit a $20 million grant with no strings attached based on BDT’s track record. According to a Harvard Kennedy School case study released that same year, BDT (which launched in 2005) was instrumental in helping “more than 125,000 Philadelphia residents secure over $1.6 billion in benefits as of January 2021.”

The organization contributed to those numbers in two primary ways. First, it developed an open-source software tool known as Community Prism, which screened individuals and determined their eligibility for disparate benefits. Prism was an attempt to create a “one-stop shop” for benefits access, which could be used remotely and incorporated into existing workflows. Second, BDT was the project manager behind BenePhilly, a call center and resource hub opened by the City’s Office of Community Empowerment and Opportunity. BenePhilly, which continues to operate today, connects Philadelphians who have benefits needs with nonprofits around the city.

BDT appeared to be a rousing success, but there were cracks beneath the surface. The reporting that’s come out about the organization’s demise has mostly focused on financial mismanagement. (An independent tax audit showed that BDT had more than $8 million in operating losses in 2023.) Some of BDT’s collaborators observed additional issues.

During the pandemic, BDT joined a public-private initiative led by United Way called The Promise, an attempt to alleviate poverty through a collaborative action plan that viewed benefits enrollment as the centerpiece of those efforts. Dozens of partners participated in The Promise, including the Campaign for Working Families, a nonprofit based in Sharswood which supplies free tax preparation services to thousands of people each year. That collaboration between the Campaign for Working Families and BDT didn’t go as planned.

“When we would refer clients to [BDT], they would have to wait several months to be signed up for the benefits they needed,” says Dr. Nikia Owens, the Campaign’s president and CEO. “The whole point was to reach people immediately, so that when they came in to get their taxes done, we’d be able to capture that moment and connect them with benefits. BDT was not able to do that.”

That’s when the Campaign took another approach. “Initially, we were just doing the screening and BDT would do the enrollment. Once that started slowing down, and people had to wait two or three months, we then just basically brought that work in house and started doing it ourselves,” says Owens.

A few years later, the Campaign has fully integrated benefits navigation into its other services, and it hasn’t looked back. The transition has perhaps revealed a better model for the people seeking those benefits. As a tax preparer, the Campaign already had access to most of the important documents and information needed for people to enroll in benefits like SNAP or LIHEAP. So, in many cases, BDT was duplicating work — and, towards the end of its run, doing so with significant lag times.

And the other main function of BDT — its digital screening tool, Prism — also waned in its effectiveness over time. In fact, during the pandemic, the PA Department of Human Services released a new version of a tool that has improved upon and supplanted the programming of BDT. That system, known as PA Compass, has made the task of taking on benefits enrollment work, like the Campaign and PASSi have done, significantly easier.

Still, despite its flaws, BDT was “by far the most comprehensive service provider” when it comes to benefits enrollment, says Kristin Romens of Pew. While the emergence of PA Compass has empowered some nonprofits to bring a portion of that work in-house, it’s been hard to replicate all of what the well-endowed BDT previously did. “BDT was taking massive sets of data, and then comparing them to other massive sets of data, to figure out who wasn’t enrolled in programs that they were likely eligible for,” says Romens. “They had a very proactive, highly targeted approach.”

An opportunity to improve community trust

In the days before BDT closed for good, The Citizen ran a guest commentary written by two doctors at CHOP who warned that the loss of that human capital and institutional knowledge could be significant for the city. Before it closed, BDT had 273 employees, including dozens of public-facing navigators who helped Philadelphians with accessing benefits.

When I reached one of the authors in October, he struck a resilient tone while noting that providers in the city are still adjusting to the loss. “All the benefits specialists. That’s where the city is feeling the loss,” says Dr. George Dalembert, a founding director of the hospital’s Medical Financial Partnership (MFP), a program to support health outcomes by encouraging families to enroll in benefits.

“Our people recognize that the work should continue, and we’re seeking out ways so that it can continue,” he says. “As with many examples of tumult and change, there was also opportunity.”

For years CHOP’s MFP program has employed its own navigators while relying on BDT’s screening tools and expertise. Together, they secured roughly $2.7 million annually in benefits for CHOP families. Now that BDT is no more, MFP has been tweaking its system and training staff in order to directly enroll their clients in a handful of benefits, even if they can’t offer the breadth of BDT.

“We’re able to put our heads down and make that happen relatively quickly,” says Dalembert.

Although the loss of BDT has been disruptive, it was not reaching those tens of thousands of people all on its own. A lot of clients were shared with other nonprofits and programs like MFP, meaning they have not been suddenly orphaned. Those partners are continuing the work, some of them deploying additional resources to augment it. “It’s a bit of the silver lining that we’ve had to do that work differently, bringing it internal,” says Dalembert.

Still, the bottom line impact on how many people receive public benefits is unclear. So far, the PA Department of Human Services has only released data on SNAP enrollment through August 2024, the last month of BDT’s operations. While we’ll get a clearer picture in time, it’s possible that the loss will be less significant than initially feared — due to the efforts of other service providers.

In the end, BDT’s enduring legacy might be seen as a stepping stone. If the organization lost its way or outlived its purpose, then it still inspired providers across the city to embrace the work of benefits navigation and the importance of innovation along with it — even if those services now reside elsewhere.

For example, PASSi is optimistic that it can replicate some of the data analytics strategies that BDT employed to identify and contact clients. According to Yang, the nonprofit is developing a new data management system (one that’s compliant with HIPAA) that could eventually power some of those big data tasks, “one database that we can run reports and queries against, and hopefully capture trends, zip codes, that kind of thing,” says Yang. “What we would hope to do down the line is try to do some of, at least some of what BDT was doing [from a data standpoint].”

And there could be another upshot to this shift in the landscape. Organizations that have taken up the mantle are often trusted navigators and problem solvers in their communities. It’s reasonable to think that the work — explaining benefits and helping people receive money that’s intended for them — would be a natural extension of the trust they’ve built up over time.

“We’re not just saying, Alright, come in for a SNAP application,” says Yang. “What is the overall picture of what your circumstances are? Let’s take the time to find out what you want and let’s see if there are other ways in which we can achieve the assistance that you want.”

BDT’s absence allows more community-based nonprofits to build trust and brand equity for their services. “It’s a win for the city and region to have the landscape of local nonprofits and service providers stepping up,” says Yang. “But for us, it’s also an opportunity. We’re also very proud to be just PASSi. We don’t want our name to exclude folks who might not be Asian and could receive our services.”

“Give us a call to get your SNAP application or your LIHEAP application,” Yang adds. “As long as you’re willing to give us a shot, we want to do it.”