We’re excited to announce that Nava Labs is publicly sharing our Caseworker Empowerment Toolkit, a suite of open source, AI-powered tools that help caseworkers connect families with public benefits. These are some of the first open source agentic and AI-powered tools built for and with caseworkers.
Nava is a public benefit corporation on a mission to make government services simple and effective. Nava Labs, Nava’s philanthropically-funded division, focuses on researching and prototyping policy and systems changes in government programs and advocating for their adoption.
For over two years, Nava Labs has been building, testing, and iterating on benefit navigation tools with governments and community partners in California, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. Early results from the pilots show that these tools offer real promise to help caseworkers be more efficient and effective in their jobs helping families.
Nava Labs is designing tools that are open source to help government agencies avoid the vendor lock-in associated with proprietary systems. To accomplish this, Nava Labs is leveraging Strata, Nava’s gold-standard target architecture and suite of open source tools that gives government agencies everything they need to run a modern service.
“Public benefits are a lifeline for families experiencing economic hardship, yet an estimated $227 billion in benefits go unclaimed annually due to barriers such as lack of information and administrative burdens in the application process,” said Genevieve Gaudet, Director of Nava Labs. “Our work seeks to close that gap by responsibly using AI to empower staff who are on the front lines.”
A caseworker’s job is to help people navigate and apply for benefits. In practice, a lot of their day goes to other things: searching policy manuals while a client waits, re-entering the same data across multiple portals, chasing down documents that don’t meet program requirements. These tools are built to help caseworkers through each step of their workflow and give time back so caseworkers can focus on the human aspect of their jobs. The toolkit includes:
A referral generator that searches health and social service resources to surface relevant options based on each client’s situation, and then write a step-by-step action plan.
An assistive chatbot that gives caseworkers real-time answers in plain language, with direct policy citations so they can confirm before they act.
DocumentAI, which identifies document types, extracts required data, and flags issues in real time.
An agentic form-filling assistant that helps fill out application forms using existing client data. Caseworkers review for accuracy, fill in anything missing, and submit.
Try out the tools yourself on our new demo site or dive into the code and documentation on GitHub. Governments and community partners who are interested in deploying these tools can reach out at labs@navapbc.com.
The demo site enables caseworkers to try out the toolkit’s key features, like the DocumentAI tool shown above.
