Income Support Specialist, People’s Emergency Center

Posted by on September 30, 2013

Income Support Specialist, People’s Emergency Center
Posted on: September 4, 2013

Job description
The Income Support Specialist provides direct services to low to moderate-income individuals who are enrolled as Financial Opportunity Center participants. Income support specialists assist clients in finding ways to supplement their income or reduce expenses through benefits that the FOC will refer to as income supports. Income supports may include, but are not limited to public benefits such as food stamps, medical benefits, LIHEAP, and more; other benefits may include EITC, free eye glasses or emergency cash assistance. These income supports may be difficult to apply for or challenging to find or understand. It is the role of the income support specialist to make these benefits accessible to FOC clients. Furthermore, the income support specialist must be resourceful and motivated to find new benefit sources for their FOC clients. The income support specialist will work with employment counselors and the financial coach to ensure that the client is getting assistance across these three major service areas.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Provide one-one-one income support counseling to program participants
• Conduct a general benefits screening
• Discuss all benefits for which the client is eligible with that client
• Assist the client through the application process, as needed
• Understand other services offered by the agency such as the employment services and financial coaching, and connect the clients to these services
• Outcome tracking including tracking the stories and success of program participant
• Maintain contact with the client and monitor the status of their applications (e.g. lost, approval, denial, re-certification, etc.)
• Use Efforts to Outcomes (ETO), a client management system to document and reflect the outcome of their clients accurately and in a timely manner
• Update the Combined Financial Assessment (CFA) for their clients to reflect changes to their budget via income supports (e.g. food stamps) OR alert the financial coach to this change
• Participate in the creation of monthly program updates and progress reports
• Work with Financial Opportunity support staff to create and maintain up-to-date information about clients’ financial status and goals
• The income support specialist may conduct workshops as a means of outreach and education.
• The classes may be part of a larger job readiness class offered by the FOC, or may be occasional workshops to the public
• Develop workshop materials or tailor existing materials to meet the needs of the community
• Workshops should be relevant to the community, and may include topics such as : SNAP, Medicaid, TANF, social security
• Develop relationships with local government offices and community organizations

http://www.idealist.org/view/job/7HSWgs496N2D