Difficulties faced by community workers who help people with their benefits

Government benefits are designed to improve the lives of Canadians. Many benefits help people based on their health, job, housing, or family situation.

According to the 2022 Auditor General’s report, accessing these benefits can be hard for many reasons (see Access to Benefits for Hard-to-Reach Populations).

The report lists a few of those reasons. It also lists some options available to those who need help with applying.

The report says that people often rely on community organizations to learn about the help they could receive. We saw a similar trend in other research reports. From that, we concluded that community workers play an important role in helping people get government benefits. So, we decided to learn more about the problems that they face when they carry out this task.

Here are some problems that we identified from our own research studies and other reports.

It takes time to learn about government benefits

We talked to several community workers who said it takes a lot of time and effort to become familiar with government benefits. This is because there are so many of them, they come from different sources, and they have different eligibility criteria.

They also said it’s hard to understand information on government websites. This was also mentioned in the reports we read.

It's hard to stay updated on news about benefits

From our research, we learned that community workers try to stay updated on news about benefits, but don’t have a good way to do so.

There isn’t one location that a person can go to see all the updates. Instead, the workers we talked to said that they made their own solutions. Some created news alerts, others subscribed to newsletters. Despite that, they were sure that they were missing some updates.

It's hard to understand eligibility conditions and the application process

The reports we read said that it’s difficult to apply for benefits because applications are long and ask for a lot of information.

The workers we talked to said that it’s hard to know which forms people need and where to find them.

Complicated eligibility criteria make it hard to know if someone qualifies for a benefit. This can stop people from starting a long application process. Most don’t want to spend the effort if they don’t think they qualify.

We want to make it easier to understand government benefits

To fix the problems identified in our research, we want to make a tool that simplifies information about government benefits.

This tool will make it easier for anyone to:

• be aware of benefits
• know how to apply
• stay updated on changes

By making this information easier to understand, we believe more people will apply for the benefits to which they are entitled.