Find Your Funds

PROBLEM: In 2021, as part of a pandemic aid package, the federal government passed the Advanced Child Tax Credit, bringing over $100 billion federal dollars to 67 million children across the country. These funds complemented additional funding available to low-income families through the Earned Income Tax Credit and stimulus checks. However, over 4 million children were expected to miss out on this money simply because their parents or guardians did not file taxes. In Massachusetts alone, 58,000 eligible children were likely to miss out on the Advance Child Tax Credit, 80,000 eligible individuals were missing out on the Earned Income Tax Credit, and 220,000 eligible individuals did not receive a stimulus check.

PARTNERS: We joined forces with the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, Greater Boston Legal Services, Children’s HealthWatch, Massachusetts Association for Community Action, and Boston Tax Help Coalition to form a powerful coalition dedicated to helping families access the federal funds available to them.

SOLUTION: Together with our partners, we created a new tool called “FindYourFunds” to help zero-income and low-income households who traditionally do not file taxes understand and access the funds for which they are eligible. This single, trustworthy source included information on all available federal benefit programs, walked each user through a personal set of questions to determine their eligibility, and provided online, by-phone, and in-person options to get assistance in applying for these funds. We complemented this tool with a multilingual, statewide outreach campaign that effectively reached traditional non-filers. We partnered with state agencies like the Department of Transitional Assistance (DTA), who sent text messages and flyers to existing clients, and the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), who utilized its network of superintendents to disseminate information to public school students statewide. We mailed flyers to over 560,000 households that received Pandemic-EBT (P-EBT) and partnered with the Commonwealth to send texts in six languages to over 500,000 SNAP, TANF, and WIC recipients. We identified a dozen cities across Massachusetts with a high rate of non-filers and partnered with mayors in each city, hosting Facebook Live conversations and garnering local media attention. And we created a simple how-to YouTube video on applying for the Child Tax Credit through the federal government’s GetCTC.org tool, and we worked with local leaders and members of the press to share the video broadly, resulting in over 21,000 views.

ADOPTION: From the launch of FindYourFunds.org in July 2021 through November of that year, the website was visited by over 376,000 people, with nearly 75,000 clicking through to apply for available funds. As a result, the number of Massachusetts children receiving Child Tax Credit payments increased during this time by $15,000, with every child in Massachusetts receiving an average of $242 per month. During this short period of time, $1.28 billion in federal funding was distributed to Massachusetts residents, with the rate increasing by an average of 4.4% each month since the launch of FindYourFunds. Additionally, thanks to the resources available on FindYourFunds and the YouTube training video, 2,605 new tax returns were filed on GetCTC.org during this time period, resulting in $10.9 million new federal dollars coming into Massachusetts. The FindYourFunds tool gained national attention and was highlighted by the White House in a press release and webinar as the gold standard for helping residents access the resources available to them.