Counting on Charities

Census Bureau uses non-profit help to recruit workers, promote tally

Kenneth Prewitt has spent much of his life in the philanthropic world —

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both as a grant maker at the Rockefeller Foundation and as the leader of prominent social-science research organizations.

Now that he has taken the reins of the U.S. Census Bureau, he still relies heavily on the skills he learned as a non-profit leader — especially the art of persuading community activists to work together in pursuit of the common good.

Mr. Prewitt has two big tasks at hand: First, he hopes to use charities to recruit a significant portion of the manpower needed to go door-to-door to collect enough census forms to get an accurate count. Second, he is counting on charities to run publicity campaigns and make other efforts to insure that the most vulnerable Americans are not missed in the decennial count of the U.S. population — a move that will guarantee that minority groups, children, and the poor, among others, get their fair share of the billions of dollars in government funds distributed using census data.

Already, Mr. Prewitt has successfully persuaded groups such as Goodwill Industries International to help the bureau recruit, hire, and train thousands of census takers. Mr. Prewitt estimates that he needs 860,000 temporary workers — more than the population of Wyoming — to knock on doors. Finding those workers, he says, will not be easy at a time when unemployment is at record lows.

Those workers will be trying to deal with a problem that the federal government has been facing since 1970: The percentage of Americans willing to respond to census questions by mail has been dropping steadily, from 85 per cent in 1970 to only 65 per cent in 1990.

Mr. Prewitt says the increasing difficulty of getting Americans to participate in the census prompted him to start the ambitious effort to attract non-profit support.

He has more than doubled the size of the bureau’s “partnerships” division, from 295 to 642 employees, to enable it to reach out to many more non-profit organizations than ever before, and to encourage the press, businesses, and local governments to ask people to fill out census forms.

Though he has managed to expand the number of federal workers reaching out to non-profit leaders, Mr. Prewitt is not able to offer federal money to charities that undertake efforts to convince people to respond to census forms.

Instead, the bureau is relying largely on organizations to donate whatever time and resources are needed to encourage their clients and others to respond to census questionnaires — or to raise money for such activities from private sources. While some have been willing, others — especially organizations that are helping the poor deal with changes in federal welfare laws — say they are too strapped for time and funds to do so.

Mr. Prewitt says that it is in charities’ self-interest to do what they can to make sure that their clients are counted so that they receive their representative share of government funds.

“Most of the benefits that come from the census are a fixed pie,” he observes. “If someone is counted and someone else is not, the people who are not counted are the losers.”

That argument explains why non-profit groups that serve people who are most likely to be missed by the census have been among the most eager to respond to the bureau’s call.

Such organizations say they care about the issue because they know the difference that getting an accurate count can mean to the people they represent.

Census data are used to determine how some $180-billion in federal funds are distributed through programs such as Medicaid and welfare, and cities and towns that lose out because of an inaccurate count may need to step up their requests to charities and foundations for private aid.

Census figures also determine the number of seats in Congress each state receives and are used to draw Congressional districts, state legislative districts, and school districts.

To groups that represent minorities, the census is also about respect, says Karen Narasaki, executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium. “It’s about making our community visible, and making our community count,” she says.

Indeed, those are the very words the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund used to name its advocacy campaign: “Make Yourself Count!” — or “Hagase Contar!” It has raised $2-million to encourage participation in the 2000 Census, following up similar campaigns in 1980 and 1990.

A particular concern in next year’s census is keeping track of the rising proportion of Latinos who are immigrants, and thus more likely to face language barriers in completing the census.

While the Census Bureau will be operating “questionnaire assistance centers” to help non-English speakers, MALDEF is producing its own series of brochures and posters in Spanish, which are designed to encourage participation and to help individuals complete the forms.

In collaboration with MALDEF, the two major Spanish-language television networks, Univision and Telemundo, have helped produce public-service announcements starring Latino celebrities such as the boxer Oscar De La Hoya and the baseball player Sammy Sosa.

The fund also has a staff of six regional directors who coordinate local efforts to make sure Latinos are aware of the census and know where to go for translation assistance if needed.

In the same spirit as MALDEF, the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium is producing educational brochures and videos — with the additional challenge of doing so in a dozen different languages, including Korean, Vietnamese, and Chinese.

At times, it has found its efforts to reach out to Asian community groups to be an uphill battle.

“The community agencies are telling us that although they understand the importance of the census, they are so swamped because of welfare-reform issues and other programs they are working on,” says Ms. Narasaki. “And right now, the government isn’t providing any funding for them to do the kind of education work they need to do.”

Many civil-rights groups were drawn to the issue not only by the Census Bureau’s outreach efforts but also by the controversy over how the census is to be conducted. To improve the count’s accuracy and to cut costs, the Census Bureau had proposed to use sampling techniques to estimate the number of people in populations, such as minority groups, that were the most likely to be undercounted.

That move was embraced by civil-rights groups, Democrats, and demographic experts but rejected by Republicans in Congress, who argued that the Constitution required a head count. The Supreme Court backed part of the G.O.P. interpretation, but debate continues over whether sampling can be used to change the way federal funds are distributed to the states or how Congressional districts are drawn.

The result has been that a growing number of civil-rights organizations are paying closer attention to the census.

For example, about 75 of the 180 organizations that belong to the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights now participate in a special committee on the census. When the census committee was first started two years ago, only seven or eight organizations volunteered to participate.

Reaching minority groups is only one of the many challenges facing the Census Bureau. With a larger-than-ever population to count, the Census Bureau needs to hire more workers than ever — enough to visit each of the 42 million households that will probably not return forms in the mail.

Census Bureau officials estimate that they will need to recruit about two million job applicants just to get enough people who can pass a screening test and who will accept the jobs — most of which are temporary and offer no benefits.

In May, Goodwill announced that it would help the Census Bureau by recruiting graduates of its employment and training programs to serve as census workers. Goodwill trains people who are poor or disabled in a wide array of work skills.

Goodwill plans to place special emphasis on recruiting former welfare recipients and is asking the Labor Department to finance the effort with $20-million. While Goodwill plans to recruit former welfare recipients even if it does not win the grant, the federal aid would allow it to do so on a much larger scale, enabling it to recruit at least 7,500 to 10,000 individuals.

While the Census Bureau has been vigorous in efforts to persuade non-profit groups to lend a hand, it must ultimately rely on whatever contributions they are willing to offer.

It can’t dangle the carrot of grant money: The Census Bureau has asked for money to give to non-profit organizations and others that help, but Congress has refused to provide it. Indeed, the bureau is still struggling to meet its own basic costs: It says it needs an additional $1.7-billion now that it cannot use sampling techniques to conduct the census, but it’s not yet clear how much Congress will allot.

Not only is government support hard to come by, but charities that want to run census programs also have trouble getting money from private foundations. With the exception of a few large national foundations such as the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, most grant makers have not taken an interest in the issue.

“It’s not a sexy subject,” says Geri Mannion, a program officer at the Carnegie Corporation. “People don’t remember it from decade to decade or don’t understand the importance of it.” Largely because of Ms. Mannion’s enthusiasm for the issue, however, Carnegie has awarded some $850,000 in Census 2000-related grants.

Corporate grant makers have been more willing to finance census projects, charity leaders say.

“The corporations do see the immediate value because of their marketing needs,” says Beatriz Lopez-Flores, vice-president of community education and public policy at MALDEF, which has received at least $860,000 from companies for its census work, in addition to thousands of dollars’ worth of in-kind contributions. “They immediately see that an accurate count means they will know how to focus their message in different communities.”

It’s still not too late for grant makers to make census grants, says Kathy Bonk, executive director of the Communications Consortium Media Center, in Washington. “One area where there is still room for investment is how to use the data once it is collected,” says Ms. Bonk. “The access to the data for the year 2000 will be a lot more extensive, given computer capacities and new technologies that have made census data more widely available. Non-profits need to know what is at stake.”

In the end, Mr. Prewitt thinks that what is ultimately at stake in the census is Americans’ ability to fulfill their obligations as citizens in an era when civic ties have frayed, as measured by other indicators such as lower voter turnout. He is optimistic that charities can help turn that trend around.

Non-profit organizations have already successfully demonstrated that they can persuade people to change their behavior, he notes, getting them to avoid drugs, for example, or practice safe sex.

Mr. Prewitt hopes that charities can exercise the same persuasive powers in encouraging people to respond to census questionnaires.

The 2000 Census, he says, “is going to be a huge experiment in whether we can talk people into being more civicly engaged.”