Honing strategy and measuring success in order to maximize the impact of social services for low income communities.
Reports and dashboards from some recent projects.
DELIVERING CHANGE | How Food Delivery Programs Can Transform Lives
Diana Jensen Consulting Services worked with Burke, Inc. to conduct research illuminating the impact of home-delivered grocery programs for vulnerable populations. The research explores improvements to emotional and physical well-being, time and money savings, and other benefits. We also explored the game-changing impact that partnerships with third-party delivery partners has in making it possible for food assistance organizations to offer delivery of vital groceries at scale. Research was funded by Amazon. Feeding America acted as an advising partner.
The February 2025 report on the Claim Your Cash Los Angeles (CYCLA) pilot analyzes its first year, focusing on efforts to increase tax credit uptake among low-income LA County residents. The program leveraged existing connections with frontline benefits workers to drive new users to free tax preparation services at VITA partner sites. While some agency partners were effective at bringing in new filers and transitioning them from paid tax products to free services, others saw less impact. Expanding VITA sites in 2024 will likely boost the program's success, and more detailed data collection in future years will provide a clearer picture of the pilot's full impact.
The California Association of Food Banks (CAFB) partnered with Diana Jensen Consulting Services to conduct research that will inform the development of a replicable and scalable strategic procurement policy for Bay Area food banks. The goal of that research was to operationalize equity, reflect food bank clients' ethnic/racial diversity, and build a more resilient and just regional food system. On the demand side of that research, our team sought to learn, in each Bay Area county and across the region:
What types of foods do BIPOC food assistance program participants want and are not getting at all or are not getting as frequently as they would like?
How much is the unmet demand for each major food type where there’s a notable gap?
The expansion of CalFresh benefits to Supplemental Security Income (SSI) recipients in 2019 was the biggest increase in program eligibility in decades. This 2-pager provides highlights successes from that expansion and opportunities for fuller, more equitable enrollment based on analysis of state data.
See below for the updated dashboard tool to help program administrators, outreach partners, and local advocates understand successes and remaining opportunities locally.
This 2022 report synthesizes findings from state data, key stakeholder interviews, and a client focus group to evaluate the successes and challenges of the initial roll-out of CalFresh to SSI recipients. It identifies remaining gaps as of June 2021 (updated in materials shared above), and provides a roadmap to fulfill the full promise of the expansion.
In a rapidly changing funding and service environment, the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank commissioned this report in order to understand the impact of their home-delivered grocery program for participants and to identify opportunities for sustaining it into the future.
Read the full report and the 2-page summary.
