Many assistance programs are designed around supporting an entire household in addition to the individual. But households come in many forms and it's often unclear how a particular program might define a household. And when this happens, two bad result: people who should qualify think they don't and people who don't qualify think they do.
We've seen this at scale across many of our large-scale guaranteed income programs and disambiguating households quickly became a laborious task to better understand individual applicant's unique situations. So we tasked ourselves with making this better and finding ways for potential recipients to help us better understand their individual situations and the household calculator was born.
What is a Household Calculator?
A household calculator is an element that can be used across AidKit's platform to collect structured information on the people who surround a potential recipient:
Like everything else in AidKit, it's completely customizable. As a partner, you can define completely custom roles like "Parent" or "Roommate" or "Adopted Child" and then specify what specific information you might want to collect about each. For example, if a potential recipient might live with a sibling you could ask for the financial dependence between the potential recipient and their sibling. If you wanted to better understand a potential recipient's child situation you might ask for their birth date or year of birth.
And with this data collected, you can then factor it into eligibility determinations and other forms of checks to ensure that people are only represented in you programs once. Like everywhere else across AidKit, all of this data is stored and transmitted encrypted. This new component works just as well on a mobile device as it does on desktop and can be used in any language your program needs.
Special thanks to Theresa Gonzales who conceptualized, designed and implemented this powerful new capability!
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