March 20, 2018

ACCESS NYC functions as a public online screening platform in which residents or benefits navigators answer a brief set of questions to discover whether they’re potentially eligible for food, money, housing, or work benefit programs offered by the City — and find out how to apply.

The Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City, with the assistance of the Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity, seeks a software development partner for creating an API for public benefits eligibility screening.

Developing an API for public eligibility screening will work to:

• Extend eligibility screening into new tools: The goal of opening ACCESS NYC eligibility screening through creating and exposing an API is to extend the capacities of comprehensive benefits screening to city agencies and partners to utilize for their own digital products, tools, services.
• Be human-centered: The same principles of user-centered design apply to the development and publication of APIs (simplicity, obviousness, fit-for-purpose etc).
• Granularity: The API should be designed at the lowest practical level of granularity to make the service simple and flexible.(e.g. submit data for specific benefit program eligibility)
• Functionality: The API should be designed to provide full coverage, allowing for functionality independent of ACCESS NYC.

Proposals are due April 20, 2018

For technology vendors interested in assisting with the development of the API, learn more about the ACCESS NYC Eligibility Screen API Request for Proposal.