Description: This passage is mainly about access florida login. In this passage, we can know that Florida has redesigned and modernized its process for determining eligibility for public assistance. The Automated Community Connection to Economic Self-Sufficiency model is streamlined, cost efficient, and nationally recognized for excellence.
If you look up the word government in the thesaurus, you find synonyms such as control and command, what you don’t see our words such as service or support, that has always been the problem with government, the conflict between its role as a rule maker and that of the public servant, nowhere that is more evident than in the delivery of critical social services.
In Florida they have made a startling discovery, it is the effort to control costs and command compliance, that is costing the taxpayers of a fortune, this revelation leads to the creation of access Florida, it’s a program that uses innovative technology and relationships with over 2600 community partners to achieve efficiency and cost effectiveness while maintaining the dignity and privacy of the public.
The result is a recurring saving of 83 million dollars a year, this is how they do it, we are finding over to deliver services such as cash assistance, food stamps and Medicaid which is costing us a lot of money, therefore we develop this program to encourage people to apply electronically, I am thinking about the transition to our new access business model.
I think one of the most critical components is the development of our community partner Network, we have a network of over 2600 community partners in this state that help our customers to be able to access our benefits and to apply online to get information about services, traditionally someone would go to maybe four or five sites within a county.
Now in one County, we possibly have over 200 sites where somebody can apply, historically they may have gone to a site and waited for several hours in line, and now they can go in, sit down and spend about 20 to 25 minutes on the computer and apply, and when we partners get together, we share our resources, we share our ability to connect people to the help that they need, it’s a win-win for everyone.
The food bank that we’re going to is a wonderful cooperative, it has access services, it also has medical and employment services that help people in a variety of ways, the greater Orlando food bank is a perfect example of that we have been able to partner with the community, a food pantry that is already offering services to the community, they are now able to offer employment assistance public assistance.
We began this partnership with the food bank nearly two years ago with two computers, we now have a dozen computers that have enabled the food bank to reach even more people than they were reaching before, this is blossomed and it will continue to the road, I was inundated with families coming to the church who needed help, I needed assistance and we didn’t have a solution for.
People were working, they were good people, they were struggling in this economy and we simply needed to give them what we call a hand up and not a handout, so we started, what we thought was going to be a small food pantry, and it ended up being bigger than we could ever imagine, that was over six years ago.
Today at the greater later food outreach, we serve over seven thousand families, every single senior citizen and single mom those in need, anybody in this community comes to us to get help, food program is our safety net, it catches people who are going to fall through the cracks into homelessness, but we know that it is only one part of the solution.
We know that we need a ladder to help people climb out of poverty into success, we need the ladder that helps families break the cycle of poverty which is made through technology, the computers that you see here help people access Medicaid, food stamp programs, job assistance programs, without that technology they couldn’t break free from the cycle of poverty.
Faith-based nonprofits comes together with the government, as a community, we’re going to help people who have needs, the 400 volunteers that put time here every month, our compassion individuals that want to make a difference in people’s lives, Alba who is our director of services here, she does this because she legitimately wants to see people’s lives change, and you can see that when you meet her.
I want you to meet some of the people that come to the center and how we’re able to help, we have a phone, so he is a homeless person and we have got the good news that he has been approved for his footsteps, 82 dollars which is a lot, which is good is that we’re fighting for that now, we’re going to help him and one of the volunteers has been helpful.
We’re going to change his date of birth that they have made a mistake, so we’re going to do the changes in the computer, it’s much more better than cook on everything, nothing’s going to point out but that’s out, I’m not reading here, it’s better for them to have a volunteer help me out, I want all of you know that, it’s not for the camera.
Everybody has been through such a hard time, and I want you to meet another person over here, Ernest how are you? Fine thank you, you feel personal relationship in the commune if the logic agencies shuffling and shuttling, let’s go to the next person, but here it’s not the case, he has a very beautiful story and we’re trying to get him back on his feet.
I’ve made some poor choices in life and I wound up homeless, and soon we’ll have a place to stay, and I’m going to be starting full-time work soon, when you can come into a place, that can help you make the process much easier, it’s a wonderful thing, a lot of people don’t know where they can go to get help, and I always tell people that they come here.
In the last goal what can you do for me? We are like a connection center, there’s a sign when you come to the door says Community Connection, and we need to reconnect, those of us are in need, you see them as brothers and sisters, and I need to help my brothers and sisters, you learn to grow a love for those who are in need.
We will come in here, they’re their wit’s end and they don’t know where to turn, we try to help him out, a lot of people don’t even know how to use computers sometimes, so we come in, we go into the websites, and we walk them through it, people don’t even speak English, so we translate it for them who know a different language.
Sometimes people come in here and they’re frustrated, and I’m trying to help, then we can realize what they’re going through, they’re looking for help, your kids are looking for help with their job, you know they’re on their last dime, so we try to help them, one day last week I came to say and to regroup, thank you very much for information with me.
Thank you for what you do with this entire staff, it’s an asset to the community, we appreciate you, thank you very much, the community partnership arrangement works so well in so many areas and this is a fabulous example of that, we’re going to go next to where we try to on our own to bring a bank of computers to attunity.
This is an example of a storefront office, we have several setups across the state to help provide access in small communities where we wouldn’t have a large community partner network or full-fledged service center, when we go to small offices such as this, we can put them in a variety of small communities to bring the service to the people.
We work hand-in-hand with the community partners, and we provide the same services that our community partners provide applying for public assistance, returning information to the processing center, calling the customer service center or doing a telephone interview for their case, we have knocked off at least half of the processing time by providing a lot of access points, and then consolidating the workers together.
We reduce the processing, the eligibility specialist, the Quality Assurance people all that others down our off-site elsewhere in what we call a processing center, this is modernized service center in a traditional government building, its forms are much the same function as the storefront we saw earlier, except on a larger scale.
It has a self-service area for copying and faxing and a web application, the old name of our program with economic self-sufficiency, we add an automated community connection to that to make access, but we are not a self-sufficient environment, so the model grows and it starts with making your own copies giving us more information on paper.
And then two years ago, we got the web application which took our model to a new level, and now the customers in control of the input of current data, whether from their homes, from storefronts community partner sites, from places such as this, all go into one giant database where it’s been farmed out electronically to processors throughout the state.
We have a large processing center upstairs in this building, this is the north pinellas service center, about ninety percent of our applications come through the web, the other ten percent maybe mail fax their imaged in and they see them on these computers here, they do an eligibility determination.
They call the customers on the phones to complete every being interviews, and do an eligibility process for public assistance, food stamps, cash assistance and medicaid, this service center alone processes over 6,000 applications a month, we receive approximately 400,000 applications a month.
Ninety percent are done electronically, we’re saving 83 million dollars a year in recurring savings, we’ve been able to reduce our staff by forty three percent yet, we’re dealing with more applications, we’re providing more services more quickly in a more quality manner, one of the great things about access is that as people have gotten used to the idea, we now have partners that come to us and say that I want to be a part of this exciting initiative, I want to be able to help people get the services.