State of New Jersey Department of Labor
Oct 2024 - December 2026
Why This Matters For Families
Over the past 20 years, 13 states and D.C. have adopted paid family and medical leave (PFML) programs that provide income support to families when new children arrive, a family member needs care, or a family breadwinner suffers their own personal health issue. Paid leave is associated with higher labor force participation rates, higher earnings over time, better health, worker retention and productivity, and economic growth.
The New Practice Lab team is working directly with state administrators, as well as the individuals and families whom they serve, to streamline state paid leave program benefits. The team has also offered guidance to states working to pass paid family and medical leave laws, offering advice on language and processes that will aid benefit delivery to claimants and families. These programs can provide critical relief to U.S. families — but only if they reach the people who need them, when they need them.
Implementation Challenge
New Jersey first passed a temporary disability law in 1948 and later passed a Family Leave Insurance program into law in 2008. Together, these laws make up the state’s paid family and medical leave program. As one of the first states to run a paid leave program, they are facing the same issues as many older programs: legacy technology that is not easily updated to meet user needs.
While a modernization effort is underway, the state is interested in other strategies to improve access for New Jersey residents more immediately. At the end of 2024 and throughout 2025, the New Practice Lab worked with New Jersey’s Department of Labor (NJDOL) to design and implement a “navigator” pilot to assist parents with applying for leave. The unique combination of two programs (“TDI” which covers medical leave for a parent, and “FLI” which covers bonding time with a child, requiring an initial application and transitional application has contributed to confusion for new parents in particular. For those that apply to both programs, these applications can require prolonged back-and-forth communications between the state and the applicant which can result in a parent not receiving their benefits in a timely manner and forcing those who can’t go without payment to return to work earlier than planned.
Our Approach
After assessing needs from various stakeholders, including the state, area community-based organizations, health providers, and families themselves, the New Practice Lab assisted NJDOL with designing and standing up a pilot to understand if having navigators supports increased uptake of leave and an improved experience for families. The New Practice Lab helped design the structure of a navigator service, designed the training approach and materials for the navigators, and outlined evaluation metrics for pilot program in Trenton with the hopes of scaling the project state-wide if successful.
OBJECTIVE
Help NJ standup a paid leave navigator pilot program that can improve uptake of TDI and FLI for new parents.
WHAT WE DID
Interview state examiners, local community organizations supporting families, related state-based programs, and families
Offer recommendations on scope of pilot, service design, and evaluation metrics
Collaborate with the state and a partner CBO to hire and train a small number of navigators
Define evaluation metrics and help assess the pilot throughout and at the end of a set pilot period
“I have gotten a fair amount that know about the programs and have applied for their other kids in the past, and either didn’t get it, or just remember it being really difficult and frustrating… So definitely most of the time it’s news for them that they’re eligible.”
What We Learned
This project is near completion. Here’s what we’ve learned so far:
The best chance someone has of getting their benefits in a timely manner is to submit a claim completely and correctly filled out the first time. Internal processes and rules mean that any claims that require a correction or additional information are highly likely to end up in a significant backlog that may take weeks to get to. The legacy system sends form letters, rather than emails, that are often too vague for claimants to understand what is required of them and does not allow for easy language updates.
Despite increases in overall uptake across the state and an existing government-led outreach program, certain communities are still underserved or even unaware of the benefit. Working with trusted and heavily embedded community organizations, the pilot aims to increase word-of-mouth awareness, increase language support and better understand the barriers to learning and applying for paid leave.
“The WIC population is mostly immigrants, or recently just started working here and recently just got their work authorization, and don’t really know [about the program].”
Paid leave programs are complex and community-based navigators benefit from dedicated materials, training and support. Throughout the pilot, NPL and NJDOL heard how critical it was to have continued support such as quick email and phone responses and monthly Q&A sessions to help unpack general confusion and complicated scenarios their clients faced. On top of this, NPL and NJDOL created custom pilot fliers, pilot-specific training (that has been adopted by the department and repurposed for additional program outreach) and a kit of guiding documents and tools to assist in helping families.
“Having the toolkit and having anything centered was a godsend. Some people have different learning styles and working styles… I liked having something centralized, anyone could contribute, someone was curating it and vetting it, making sure it was fine.”
Community organizations are trusted access points for the communities not hearing about paid leave. However, finding the right implementation approach to weave in navigation for a complex program can be challenging. Our greatest success came from navigators embedded in WIC clinics where they regularly met with more families who may be working. During their WIC visit, the staff would also have easy access to income information which made checking likely eligibility and introducing the benefit pilot much easier. Additionally, the actual navigation work in helping someone apply was often too time-consuming for the WIC staff with limited flex hours.
Building navigation efforts into existing workstreams poses challenges and opportunities. Both of the community organizations in the pilot opted to upskill existing staff who already work on a diverse range of services. We learned that piggy-backing the pilot onto existing programming created a filtering effect on recruitment and some of the navigators struggled to find eligible parents. While the existing staff had the benefit of deep operational knowledge, their bandwidth for additional time-intensive navigation work was limited. They assisted fewer families than expected.
Future scaling of the pilot’s successes within a WIC Clinic will focus on separating initial recruitment/outreach by clinic staff and application consultation to a navigator with more availability.
Early scale pilots often bring unexpected changes — posing challenges when measuring impact. Many aspects of implementation of the navigator pilot proved different than initially expected. Because the scale and model of implementation changed, and the initial intention of embedding an impact evaluation proved challenging. Researchers and NJ partners shifted their approach to address foundational and implementation questions that helped address feasibility questions.
Next Steps
The full year of the pilot ends October 2026. NJDOL has since introduced the navigator role as a part of their state-funded outreach grant and has extended funds for both organizations for an additional 6 months.
