Wait for food stamps drops from two weeks to one day

Ada Widness has worked at the DHS Self-Sufficiency program office in Keizer for five years, helping people in need apply for food stamps and other kinds of assistance. With Oregon issuing 27 percent more food stamps today than it did a year ago, her office grows busier and busier. Lately, Widness sees emotional reactions to the application process.

On one recent regular work day, a client had grateful tears streaming down her face when Widness placed desperately needed food stamps into the client’s hands during a short office visit.

Later, a homeless client made it a point to shake Widness’ hand in appreciation for her help in ushering him through the food stamp qualification process. Soon after arriving, he left with a debit card for groceries in hand.

By exceeding customer expectations, Self-Sufficiency program office staff are experiencing more frequent acts of appreciation that reinforce the importance of recent changes they made to shorten the food stamp application process. Through Transformation Initiative work, Self-Sufficiency program offices across Oregon are now providing same-day service to 65 percent of clients and same-day or next-day service to 92 percent of clients. Before the change, hungry Oregonians often needed to make multiple trips to the office and could wait two weeks or more to receive food stamps.

“These changes are for our clients; it’s been good for them and that’s most important,” said Linda Bishop, a Human Services Specialist 3 at the McMinnville branch. “These days many people don’t even have gas money to get to and from our offices and in the past, the need to make multiple visits strained their resources. Our new ability to serve our clients in one visit is very good for them in many ways.”

Self-Sufficiency program offices needed to find ways to meet the dramatically growing demand for services with existing staff and resources. The DHS Children, Adults & Families Division used a transformation lens to find a solution. CAF held a series of Lean Rapid Process Improvement (RPI) events to ask front-line employees and supervisors to work together to pick apart the food stamp intake procedures, remove wasteful steps, and rebuild an efficient process. CAF did a statewide implementation between February and April 2009 and is consistently tracking customer and employee satisfaction.

“We are very close to having a rate of 100 percent for customer satisfaction. Clients are able to apply for benefits, be seen for an intake, receive an EBT card and shop for groceries on the same day. Besides being an excellent service to the clients, it’s also very rewarding to SSP staff,” said Debbie Swafford, program manager for the Coos Bay branch.