We’re thrilled to announce that Nava Labs has received a grant from Center for Civic Futures as part of its Public Benefit Innovation Fund. Nava Labs will pilot a set of AI-powered tools and service-design processes that reduce the time it takes for state agencies to map their outdated legacy systems from months to weeks, giving policy, program, and technical staff a shared, actionable modernization plan. The ultimate goal is to help states get the insights they need to modernize the dated systems behind Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to enable more reliable, faster services for the people who need them.
Nava is a public benefit corporation on a mission to make government services work better for the people they’re meant to serve. Nava Labs is Nava’s philanthropically funded division. It builds and tests new approaches to delivering public services, evaluates what works, and advocates for scaling proven solutions.
“People who depend on public benefits experience delayed access, lost benefits, and services that don’t fit their needs because the legacy systems agencies run on were built around decades-old technical and operational constraints,” said Genevieve Gaudet, Director of Nava Labs. “Our team is excited to partner with several states to test tools and processes to speed up legacy system discovery and deliver multidisciplinary modernization plans. We’ll also bring in an advisory cohort of states to offer feedback on how these approaches can adapt to other contexts.”
This project builds on Nava’s deep experience with both legacy systems modernization and AI innovation. As part of New Jersey’s unemployment insurance system modernization, we helped the state launch a new claimant portal and are now testing AI-powered tools for mainframe modernization. Additionally, Nava Labs is prototyping and piloting AI-powered tools to improve public service delivery — including its Caseworker Empowerment Toolkit, a suite of open source tools that help caseworkers at every step of their journey connecting families with the social safety net.
Center for Civic Futures, a program of Renaissance Philanthropy, announced this grant to Nava as part of an $11 million second round of its Public Benefit Innovation Fund, which helps government test and scale new ways to make essential benefits easier for people to access. Thanks to the first round of funding, Nava has been working with the American Public Human Services Association and the State of Maryland to help modernize and automate H.R. 1 work requirement verification.
