Product Releases
A week-by-week record of what we’ve shipped: new states, new benefit programs, partner launches, and improvements to the screener.
Week of October 5 – October 9, 2026
💬 Benji Describes Benefits the Way the Results Page Does
Benji now tells households who can help them apply. Each program’s page has a “Get Help Applying” panel listing local organizations, but Benji couldn’t see it, so it told households there was no one to help. It now names those organizations in the same order as the page. It gives phone numbers, emails, and websites only exactly as they appear on the card.
Benji also stopped calling one-time payments yearly. Its opening total no longer counts lump sums such as the $1,000 Trump Account, which it had presented as yearly income. When a program’s card shows text instead of a dollar figure, like “Varies” or “Up to $7,669 per home,” Benji now quotes that text rather than a precise number the card deliberately hides. This affects 21 programs across the states with Benji turned on.
🤝 2-1-1 Partners in Kansas, Missouri, and Chicago
The Kansas resource page named “United Way of Kansas” but linked to United Way of the Plains, a different organization. It now names United Way of the Plains. “How did you hear about MyFriendBen?” now lists United Way of the Plains in Kansas and United Way of Greater St. Louis in Missouri, so their referrals are counted and they appear in the dashboards’ Partners filter. The Kansas and Missouri co-branded headers now read “In partnership with,” matching Colorado’s. Every partner page now uses MyFriendBen’s standard fonts.
211 Metro Chicago’s co-branded Illinois screener is in place ahead of their launch. It skips the contact-information step, since 211 runs its own intake. Households who need housing get a link straight into 211’s housing directory. Their dashboard counts only households who arrive after launch.
🧾 Missouri Tax Credits Moved to the 2025 Tax Year
The Missouri Working Families Tax Credit and Property Tax Credit were calculated for 2026, a year households can’t file for yet. Both now follow the rule that tax programs use the prior tax year. For the Property Tax Credit, that means 2025 law: income limits of $27,200 for renters and $30,000 for owners, and maximum credits of $750 and $1,100. The 2026 expansion comes back when both credits roll forward on January 1, 2027. The Working Families credit now uses a child’s age at the end of the tax year, so a child who turned 19 this year still counts.
📍 Corrected Counties in North Carolina
North Carolina’s ZIP code map listed 12 ZIPs twice, and each repeat silently overwrote the first entry. For example, ZIP 28341 offered Bladen County when the right choices are Sampson and Duplin. The map was rebuilt from HUD’s current crosswalk, which changed the county choices for 93 ZIPs. 356 ZIPs now correctly ask households to choose their county.
🗂️ A Simpler Results Page
The Immediate Help tab no longer appears on results pages in Colorado, Kansas, Massachusetts, Illinois, Texas, Missouri, and Washington. CESN and North Carolina keep it. The tab’s content is kept, so any state can turn it back on.
📊 Campaign Filters on the Colorado Dashboard
The Colorado dashboard now has the UTM campaign, medium, and source filters North Carolina already had. Partners that share several tracked links can now see each one separately. Adams County Human Services, for example, can compare its website, lobby, and outreach links.
🔧 Reliability and Maintenance
We retired the old program validation system, since per-program spec tests now cover that job. This also fixed production deploy alerts, which had reported “completed with warnings” on every deploy. A new tool can safely repair 95 non-English translations where the translation renamed or dropped the spot where a number or name belongs, so the value never appeared. Groundwork landed for New Jersey, which is not yet public. Groundwork also landed for a shared “federal” setup, so programs like EITC, CTC, and Trump Account can be maintained once instead of separately in every state. Program code was reorganized, and two deploy blockers were fixed: a database migration conflict that stopped staging deploys, and an intermittent error when publishing dashboard changes.
Week of September 28 – October 2, 2026
⚖️ Federal Medicaid Rule Change for Refugees
A federal law took effect October 1 limiting Medicaid, CHIP, Medicare Savings Programs, and family planning to citizens, green card holders, Cuban and Haitian entrants, and COFA migrants. Refugees and asylees lost eligibility, and MyFriendBen had already removed those programs from their results. This release restored the two exceptions the law keeps.
Refugee children and pregnant people in states that still cover them can see those programs again — Massachusetts refugee children under 21 had lost MassHealth, and North Carolina refugee children had never seen NC Medicaid at all. Refugee adults in Colorado and Massachusetts now see Emergency Medicaid, which remains open to everyone regardless of status. North Carolina’s Emergency Medicaid also stopped excluding 64-year-olds, who are covered right up until Medicare begins.
🥫 Four New Programs
Commodity Supplemental Food Program launched in both Kansas and Missouri — a monthly USDA food box for people 60 and over.
Missouri Refugee Cash Assistance provides cash support to refugee families, with adult children counted as their own case.
Missouri Housing Choice Voucher (Section 8) completes Missouri’s housing coverage, with income tested at half of area median income. Missouri’s version is the only one of ours that accounts for medical and child care costs.
📍 Corrected Counties in Kansas and Missouri
Kansas and Missouri ZIP code maps wrongly claimed every ZIP sits in exactly one county. About half of Kansas ZIPs and 42% of Missouri ZIPs actually span more than one. Households were assigned a county silently, with no way to correct it, and every county-based program then checked the wrong place.
People in these states are now asked which county they live in when their ZIP spans more than one. St. Louis City households also no longer silently drop out of housing programs.
💵 Benefit Amounts Brought Up to Date
An audit found 112 active program settings a year or more behind on federal poverty guidelines. The clearest symptom: SSI paid $6,840 a year in Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Texas but $7,332 in Kansas, Missouri, North Carolina, and Washington for an identical household. Twelve programs were corrected against source documentation. Every discrepancy found understated benefits — households were being shown less than they qualify for.
🤖 Benji Speaks Your Language
Benji was recording every conversation as English, even when the household was screening in Spanish. Both the chat and the server now record the real language, so we can see how Benji is used beyond English.
🔧 Reliability and Maintenance
Household members, incomes, and expenses now return in a consistent order. Age calculations were consolidated into one shared function, and per-state tests were replaced with a single shared contract test. Missouri TANF documentation was corrected to record that PolicyEngine does not model the state’s neediness test — an accepted limitation, now written down as one.
Week of September 21 – September 25, 2026
🤖 Benji Sees the Whole Page
Benji now follows people onto a program’s own detail page, and can see the Additional Resources tab. Before this, Benji knew only about long-term benefit programs — so someone who said they couldn’t feed their kids tonight got an answer built from programs that pay out in weeks, while a food bank open that afternoon sat one tab away on the same screen.
🚌 Two New Programs
Missouri Metro Transit Reduced Fare cuts St. Louis transit fares roughly in half, worth about $468 a year. Five ways to qualify — age 65 or older, a disability requiring accessibility features, Medicare, SSDI, or SSI — and no income test.
Massachusetts child care assistance now runs on Massachusetts’s own eligibility rules rather than the generic federal model, so the state’s own thresholds decide who qualifies.
🌐 Choose the Language You Send In
Sharing MyFriendBen and emailing saved results both used to send in whatever language the sender happened to be reading, so a bilingual user had no way to pass the screener to someone who reads a different language. Both flows now ask which language to send in.
✅ Accuracy and Content
Kansas Refugee Cash Assistance was showing the monthly payment standard where it should have shown the annual award. Missing seed data was backfilled so new environments match production.
Week of September 14 – September 18, 2026
🤖 Benji is Live
Benji, our AI assistant, is now available to everyone across all eight states. Until now it has only run in testing. Benji sits on the results page and answers questions about the programs a household actually qualified for — which one to apply for first, what documents to bring, how long an application takes. It only discusses programs on that household’s own results, and it says when it doesn’t know something rather than guessing. Benji also follows people onto a program’s own page, which is where the questions get specific.
👍 Tell Benji When It Misses
Every Benji answer now carries a thumbs up and a thumbs down. A thumbs down asks one short follow-up — whether the answer was inaccurate, not about their results, didn’t answer the question, or was confusing — so we can see what is going wrong and fix it rather than guess.
🆘 Immediate Help, One Tab Away
The results page has a third tab, Immediate Help, for people who need something today rather than in six weeks. It appears wherever a state or partner has resources to put in it. Benji knows the tab is there and will point people to it when the honest answer is that a benefit application will not arrive in time.
🏘️ Two New Programs
Kansas Property Tax Relief for Low Income Seniors (SAFESR) — gives homeowners back 75% of the property taxes they paid on a Kansas home. It is claimed once a year on its own state form, even by people who do not file taxes, and refunds arrive in 20 to 24 weeks.
Missouri Child Care Subsidy — helps families pay for child care while a parent works, studies, trains, or looks for work, and the state pays the provider directly. Missouri put the subsidy on a waiting list on March 1, 2026, so families are told up front that they may be placed on the list instead of starting care right away.
📍 Help Beyond Benefits
Illinois added two resources for 211 Metro Chicago. The Homelessness Prevention Contact Center helps people pay rent or utility bills after a recent crisis, and Coordinated Entry is the front door to Chicago’s housing system for people who are homeless, sorting who gets housed first based on need.
Week of September 7 – September 11, 2026
Kansas and Missouri Are Live
Kansas and Missouri now appear in the screener’s state dropdown, making them publicly available for the first time. Both states had been reachable by direct link and offered to 2-1-1 referral partners who named them specifically, but anyone arriving at MyFriendBen can now choose them alongside the other six states.
Four New Kansas Programs
Kansas launched with four new benefit programs built this week:
Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP) — Kansas DCF’s child care subsidy, covering children under 13 and children 13 to 18 who are unable to care for themselves. Because Kansas sets this benefit from its own maximum hourly rate rather than what a family actually pays, the estimate is a deliberate middle ground: it understates full-time care and overstates care from a relative, and it is labeled as an estimate for families.
Housing Choice Voucher (Section 8) — Kansas becomes the fourth state with Section 8, after Illinois, Texas, and Washington. Eligibility follows HUD’s Very Low Income limit — 50% of area median income — for the household’s county and size.
Weatherization Assistance Program — home energy improvements at an average value of $7,475 per home, with income limits published out to household sizes of 16 rather than stopping at 8.
Refugee Cash Assistance — cash support for refugee families who cannot get TANF. Kansas routes refugee families with children to TANF first, so this program reaches the households TANF does not. A household member already receiving SSI drops out of the case while the rest of the family keeps its eligibility.
Help Beyond Benefits
Four new resources were added across the states. Ticket to Work, the Social Security Administration’s employment support for people receiving disability benefits, and Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which mails free books to young children, are now available in all eight states. Washington added Foundational Community Supports for housing assistance, and Kansas added Lawrence Transit’s fare-free service for Douglas County riders.
Benji Knows What to Bring
Benji, our AI assistant, can now tell people which documents they need and pass along the timing warnings a program carries. Previously Benji would honestly say it didn’t have a document list, even though nearly every program in the system ships one — so someone asking what to bring to an Early Head Start appointment got nothing useful. Benji can now also relay instructions like Lifeline’s note to enroll in SNAP first, which is exactly the kind of ordering advice people need.
Reliability and Maintenance
A production deployment test gate was fixed after it was found to not being reliably running. Real-API tests now run and block a bad release. Missouri’s Head Start and Early Head Start programs also gained protection against a subtle problem where the programs could read simulated eligibility instead of what a family actually reported receiving.
Week of August 31 – September 4, 2026
🛡️ Lifeline and Immigration Status
The Justice Department ruled in May that the 1996 welfare law limiting benefits for immigrants applies to Lifeline, the federal phone and internet discount. We had been showing Lifeline to people whose status the law excludes.
We corrected it across all eight states:
- Non-citizens and green-card holders in their first five years no longer see Lifeline. Both the qualified-status requirement and the five-year bar apply to it.
- Refugees and asylees keep it — they’re exempt from the five-year bar.
- “Other lawfully present, with permission to work” keeps it, with a warning. That single option covers two groups the law treats oppositely: parolees and VAWA self-petitioners can qualify, while TPS holders, DACA recipients and student or work-visa holders cannot. Rather than drop the program for everyone in that group, we now say plainly that work permission isn’t enough on its own and point people to the Lifeline Support Center.
- Added the Lifeline Support Center’s phone, email and website to the five states whose listing gave people no one to call.
Doing this, we found last update’s green-card fix hadn’t fully taken hold on Lifeline: the restriction was removed in several states, but an age-based duplicate of the same rule was left behind it, so the program kept showing anyway. Both are gone.
The FCC hasn’t finalized its matching rule, so people in these statuses can still lawfully enroll today. We’ve moved ahead of the rule. Showing someone fewer programs than they might get is the safer mistake, but it is still one, and we’ll revisit when the FCC acts.
🗺️ State Updates
North Carolina — Two new options on the urgent needs step: “Help finding shelter” and “Free or lower cost health care.” The closest existing option covered help with rent, mortgage or utilities, which doesn’t serve someone with no housing at all, and there was no route at all to free care — a gap that matters more now that many North Carolinians are expected to lose Medicaid under the new federal rules. Both route into NC211, filtered to the right category.
North Carolina — Child care savings were overstated for families with a school-age child. North Carolina uses two income ceilings: 200% of the poverty level for children under 6, and 133% for children 6 to 12. We were adding every child’s cost of care into the household total without checking each child against their own ceiling. A Durham family of three earning $4,500 a month saw about $1,097 a month in savings when the real figure is $717 — their seven-year-old shouldn’t have counted.
Kansas and Missouri — The public charge link on the disclaimer page was invisible. The sentence ended “…please visit the .” with nothing to click. The address was right the whole time; the label was never filled in.
Washington and Massachusetts — Those same public charge links had been pointing at dead pages. They were fixed a few weeks ago, but only in the live site, not in the files everything gets rebuilt from — so the next routine update would have quietly restored both dead links. Now fixed for good.
✅ Accuracy and Content
Application times were wrong for WIC and school meals. We timed the real applications: WIC in Kansas and Missouri takes about one to five minutes, against the 30 to 60 minutes some states were showing. School meals in Missouri is about five minutes, not 15 to 30. Someone deciding whether they have time to apply today was being told to set aside an hour for something that takes two minutes. Corrected across states, along with making the apply button read consistently where the link goes to an interest form rather than a full application.
Nurturing Futures income wasn’t lowering SNAP estimates. Boulder County found this while modeling families’ before-and-after scenarios: entering the payment under Government Benefits and then raising the amount left SNAP unchanged, while the same increase typed into the general income field correctly reduced it. Fixed. We also answered their team’s outstanding questions on running estimates for mixed-status households.
🔧 Reliability and Maintenance
We removed a piece of shared logic that could silently change who qualifies. Thirteen programs asked one place “is this household eligible for Medicaid?” before deciding their own answer — and if Medicaid hadn’t been worked out yet, the answer came back “no,” indistinguishable from a real no. Whether that produced a wrong result depended on the order programs happened to run in, and nothing checked that order. Each program now states what it depends on, and we test the sequence. This surfaced a live bug in Illinois, where the marketplace program could run early, read “not eligible” for two state programs that hadn’t been evaluated yet, and pass a check it should have failed.
Fewer ways for the dashboards to disagree with themselves. About 50 metrics were written out twice — once for a single state, once across all states — with near-identical logic kept in step by hand. Each is now defined once. Nothing looks different; there’s just no longer a way for the two versions to drift apart.
Groundwork. We cleaned up the last loose ends from reorganizing the program code, and finished the tracking behind the Colorado heat pump results page so we can see where people drop off between reading about heat pumps and looking for a contractor. No addresses or personal details are recorded.
Week of August 24 – 28, 2026
Work in Progress: Missouri
- MO HealthNet (Medicaid) — Missouri’s Medicaid program, covering adults through ACA expansion, parents, pregnant people, seniors, and people with disabilities
- MO HealthNet for Kids (CHIP) — Children’s health coverage, with Missouri’s monthly premium subtracted from the value so families see what the coverage is actually worth to them
- Food Assistance (SNAP) — Missouri’s food assistance program. This one also unlocks others: several Missouri programs let a household qualify automatically if it already receives SNAP, and until now there was no way for a Missouri household to report that
- Energy Assistance (LIHEAP) — Help paying heating and cooling bills
- Weatherization Assistance — Free home energy improvements like insulation and air sealing
- Nurse-Family Partnership — A registered nurse who visits from pregnancy through a child’s second birthday. Not statewide in Missouri: three regional providers serve 14 counties, so the screener only shows it where it’s actually available
- Medicaid and TANF in Washington, Kansas, and Missouri no longer show for green-card-under-five households
- SNAP in Texas, North Carolina, and Kansas now correctly shows for **lawfully permanent resident children under 18**, who are exempt from the bar — three states were leaving those kids out
- North Carolina Medicaid now covers lawfully residing children up to 21, which North Carolina opted into
- Missouri SNAP was the only SNAP program in the country claiming to serve refugees and asylees; federal SNAP doesn’t, so that’s corrected
Translation Quality
State updates
Reliability and Maintenance
Week of August 17 – 21, 2026
Work in Progress: Missouri
Missouri had its biggest week yet — six more programs researched and added, and it’s now nearly ready for launch:
- Temporary Assistance (TANF) — monthly cash assistance for families with children
- Missouri Working Family Tax Credit — the state’s own version of the Earned Income Tax Credit
- Property Tax Credit (“Circuit Breaker”) — a credit that helps older adults and people with disabilities with property taxes or rent
- Medicare Savings Program — help paying Medicare premiums, deductibles, and copays
- Child and Dependent Care Credit — a credit for families paying for child or dependent care so they can work
- Lifeline — a monthly discount on phone or internet service
We also finished researching MO HealthNet (Missouri’s Medicaid program) and MO HealthNet for Kids (children’s health coverage), which are next up to build.
Missouri still isn’t open to the public. We’ll share more when it officially launches.
Help Beyond Benefits
Sometimes what someone needs isn’t a benefit program. We added two new tiles to the immediate-needs resources: Medical Expenses & Debt, available everywhere. When selected, users are shown “Dollar For” — a nonprofit that helps people get hospital bills forgiven under hospital charity care laws. We also added a Transportation tile for Missouri and Kansas, pointing people to local transit and ride assistance.
Where a state or partner hasn’t set up its own legal aid links, the screener now falls back to national legal help resources instead of showing nothing.
State updates
Washington — The Food Assistance Program (FAP) is now live: state-funded food assistance for legal immigrants who don’t qualify for federal SNAP. We told you about the research last week; it’s now built and running.
North Carolina — Finished the co-branded screener work for the Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy, and added two new urgent-need categories: Homeless Services and Free/Low-Cost Medical Care.
Colorado — Grouped the steps of our energy screener into a single confirmation section, so people review everything in one place before submitting instead of page by page.
Kansas — Research is wrapping up on WIC, the federal Earned Income Tax Credit, and the ACA Premium Tax Credit. Kansas isn’t open to the public yet; we’ll share more when it launches.
Reliability and maintenance
A large one this week: we finished a significant reorganization of the engine that calculates eligibility. Rules that had been copied separately for each state now live in one shared place, and 64 hand-maintained index files were retired in favor of programs that register themselves — which means less room for a program to be quietly missed as we add states.
We also standardized Lifeline across all eight states, adopted PolicyEngine’s data on which benefits a household is already receiving (as distinct from what they could receive) for SSI, TANF, SNAP, and WIC, and built a test system that pins program results to specific PolicyEngine versions so we catch it when an upstream change moves a number.
Week of August 10 – 15, 2026
🌽 Work in Progress: Missouri
Missouri keeps growing — this week we finished researching two more programs that go beyond the federal basics:
- Missouri Working Family Tax Credit — the state’s own version of the Earned Income Tax Credit, extra money back for working families
- Property Tax Credit (“Circuit Breaker”) — a credit that helps older adults and people with disabilities with property taxes or rent
Missouri still isn’t open to the public. We’ll share more when it officially launches.
🌻 Work in Progress: Kansas (and Missouri, together)
Benefits are only half the story — sometimes people need a food pantry or a utility assistance office this week. So we researched and verified 83 local resources for the two states: statewide lists for Missouri and Kansas, plus city-specific resources for Wichita, Kansas City, and St. Louis.
🛣️ A new state enters the pipeline: New Jersey
We kicked off the New Jersey rollout by reviewing a mapping of roughly 32 state programs — spanning health care, food and nutrition, and cash assistance — and deciding how each one will be calculated. We’re following the same playbook that’s working for Missouri.
🌊 Washington
We finished researching the Food Assistance Program (FAP) — Washington’s state-funded food assistance for legal immigrants who don’t qualify for federal SNAP — and settled on how we’ll build it into the screener. Implementation is up next.
We also removed a tooltip on the savings-and-assets question that contradicted the question it was attached to (thanks to our partners at NWIRP for flagging it!).
🏔️ Colorado
The screener now recognizes Nurturing Futures — Boulder County’s direct cash assistance program for families — as an income type people can report, so households receiving it get more accurate results.
🏀 North Carolina
Head Start is now displayed as “Head Start + Early Head Start”, making it clearer that the program serves infants and toddlers too, not just preschoolers.
📊 Sharper analytics
Last week we told you about our new state-by-state analytics. This week we fixed the events that track which programs people actually see on their results page — they had been quietly running into technical limits in our analytics platform. Now we can trust the numbers. As always: we track how the screener is used, never who is using it.
🔧 Reliability and maintenance
A big one this week: we replaced our homegrown in-memory cache with Redis, which had been pushing our servers past their memory limits. The screener now has more headroom and steadier performance.
We also standardized county-name data across Washington, Colorado, Kansas, and Missouri; cleaned out eligibility-code branches that could never actually run; fixed or retired a batch of skipped backend tests; and finalized the design for a “Currently Unemployed” button that will make it easier for people with no income to say so.
📣 One more thing
These release notes now have a permanent home — we added a Product Releases page to our website, so you can always catch up on what shipped.
Week of August 3 - 7, 2026
Work in Progress: Missouri
Missouri continues to fill in. Four more programs have been researched and added:
- Supplemental Security Income (SSI) — monthly cash assistance for people who are older, blind, or have a disability
- ACA Premium Tax Credit — help paying for marketplace health insurance
- Earned Income Tax Credit — a refundable credit for working people with low to moderate income
- Child Tax Credit — a credit for families with children
Missouri still isn’t open to the public. We’ll share more when it officially launches.
Work in Progress: Kansas
Kansas is also underway. Food Assistance (SNAP) has been added, joining over a dozen other programs, including TANF, Nurse-Family Partnership, Head Start, and the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit.
Kansas isn’t open to the public yet either. We’ll share more when it officially launches.
A co-branded experience for Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy
We launched a co-branded screener for the Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy in North Carolina. People arriving through their site now see a screener that carries their branding, keeping the experience continuous with the help they were already seeking.
A redesigned confirmation page
We rebuilt the confirmation page people see before submitting their screening, making it easier for them to review what information they are about to submit and go back and edit it as needed. See a sample of the new confirmation page.
Better insight into how the screener gets used
We’ve recently built out a detailed analytics system across the screener, and this week extended it so we can view these analytics by state. That means we can see where people hesitate, where they drop off, and which programs actually get clicked through to — and use that to fix friction instead of guessing at it. We track how the screener is used, never who is using it.
State updates
Massachusetts — Added the CommonCorp Program for Youth to the screener, along with a new SNAP navigator: the YMCA of Greater Boston, which can help people apply in person.
Washington — Fixed an issue that had kept the Working Families Tax Credit from appearing in results, and improved our benefit estimate for Housing Choice Vouchers. We also added a note that Section 8 vouchers can be hard to secure even when you qualify, so expectations are set honestly up front.
Illinois — Head Start is the newest live benefit in the screener. We also clarified how we describe LIHEAP’s different levels of energy assistance.
Texas — Improved the accuracy of our Children’s Health Insurance and Family Planning Program eligibility checks, and updated the homestead exemption estimate.
Colorado — Added a new SNAP navigator for people who need help applying, and removed a resource that’s no longer available.
Reliability and maintenance
We upgraded our hosting platform ahead of an end-of-life deadline, improved how the screener counts household members for tax credit eligibility, retired legacy data fields, and removed a confusing tooltip.
Week of July 27 - 31, 2026
Coming soon: Missouri
We’ve begun building out Missouri. The state-specific configuration is in place and the first four programs have been researched and added:
- Early Head Start — free early learning and family support for babies, toddlers, and pregnant women
- Head Start — the preschool-age counterpart
- WIC — nutrition support for women, infants, and children
- National School Lunch Program — free and reduced-price school meals
Missouri isn’t open to the public yet, and more programs are still to come. We’ll share more when it officially launches.
🌻 Coming soon: Kansas
Kansas is well underway, with about twenty programs researched and added so far. Three more came in this week:
- Temporary Assistance for Need Families (TANF) — cash assistance for families with children
- Low Income Energy Assistance (LIEAP) — help paying heating bills
- Nurse-Family Partnership — free home visits from a nurse for first-time parents
Like Missouri, Kansas isn’t open to the public yet. We’ll share more when it launches.
A co-branded experience for CU Denver
We launched a co-branded screener for the University of Colorado Denver’s Wellness & Recreation team. Students who come to MyFriendBen through CU Denver now see a screener carrying CU Denver’s branding, so the experience feels continuous with the campus resources they started from.
We also built CU Denver an aggregate dashboard — no personal information, only totals — so they can understand their campus impact: how many screenings were completed, the average number of programs matched, and the estimated dollar value of benefits surfaced, with a breakout for students.
A clearer income section
We rebuilt the part of the screener where people enter their income. Instead of asking everyone to work through a list of income sources, we now start with three plain-language questions about employment and other money coming in, and only ask for detail where it applies. Fewer questions for most people, and less confusion about what counts as income. See the new income section in action.
State updates
Massachusetts — The BabySteps Savings Plan is now in the screener. It’s a statewide program that seeds a $50 college savings account for every newborn and adopted child in Massachusetts.
North Carolina — We added a short survey to the results page so people can tell us directly about their experience.
Reliability and maintenance
We cleaned up legacy data fields, reverted a caching change that didn’t behave as expected in order to keep production stable, and fixed a handful of small interface bugs.