Benefit Navigator

The Benefit Navigator is a one-stop-shop tool, created by case managers, for case workers and their clients to navigate public benefits and tax credits and provide trusted information to fuel economic mobility. Over the past 18 years, our founding organization, Imagine LA, has helped thousands of families navigate out of homelessness and find financial security. We’ve seen, first-hand, just how difficult it is to navigate our public benefits and tax credit system. The current landscape leaves billions of dollars of critical resources on the table, enmeshing individuals, and especially families, in poverty. The Benefit Navigator was created to directly tackle the challenge of navigating complicated public benefits and tax credits to help you illuminate pathways toward financial security. We provide trusted information, systemic transparency, and help make economic mobility more accessible to all individuals. We lean into human-centered design anchored in research and recommendations from USC’s Center of Social Innovation. Our tools are thoughtfully built using vast lived expertise, along with Imagine LA’s decade-plus of experience working alongside families wading through public benefits, and rigorous pilot feedback. Beyond benefit navigation, by collecting comprehensive benefit-use data, the Benefit Navigator aims to help inform policy change to improve access to immediate temporary relief for severe economic hardship, eliminate benefit cliffs, as well as promote financial security and sustainability.