Nonprofit Organizations Scramble to Help States and Cities Gather Census Data

When the Pew Charitable Trusts last year examined the census-preparation activities of Philadelphia, the foundation’s home city, and 10 other large cities nationwide, it discovered that in nearly all of them, governments and other entities were spending less to gather information than they did a decade ago. That’s largely because the recession has drained resources for government agencies.

The same is true of many states. California, for example, has allocated less than $2-million to publicize the census, compared with roughly $25-million budgeted in 2000. Yet 10 of the 50 counties nationwide considered the hardest to count are located in that state.

Foundations and nonprofit groups are now scrambling to supplement government efforts.

The California Endowment, in Los Angeles, announced in August that it would allot about $4-million to nonprofit groups working to call attention to the census, and the California Community Foundation, also in Los Angeles, awarded $1.2-million in October.

The James Irvine Foundation, in San Francisco, has also made a series of grants for census work, including $400,000 to the Naleo Educational Fund, in Los Angeles, to help pay for training sessions with employees at groups that provide services to Hispanics, a bilingual hotline, and efforts to reach out to the news media.

Social Justice

In general, social-justice concerns about the census are at the forefront of much work by nonprofit groups, particularly in the Gulf Coast region decimated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, where tens of thousands of people remain displaced.

The Leadership Conference Education Fund, in Washington, has received $3.3-million from foundations to issue a report that outlined challenges for helping guarantee a precise count in places severely affected by the storms and to produce a video, publicized on YouTube, that depicts Louisiana and Mississippi residents explaining why an accurate count in Katrina-affected areas is crucial to rebuilding the region. In the video, Debbie Crouch, executive director of the East St. Tammany Parish Habitat for Humanity, says: “Every single day we think, ‘Maybe it’s going to start getting better,’ but every single day we have people come in here that still need housing, that still live in substandard housing, and in this country it’s a shame that we have people living like they do.”

State Efforts

State associations of nonprofit groups are also getting involved in census efforts, some for the first time.

The Michigan Nonprofit Association, in Lansing, for example, has received $330,000 from foundations to distribute to nonprofit groups working to increase the mail-return rate for census forms among African-American, Native American, and other people who might not participate in the census.

Kyle Caldwell, the association’s chief executive, says that Michigan may not fare well in the census, given how many home foreclosures it has.

“This is problematic, given that the census is address-based and people are still living in Michigan but have been displaced,” says Mr. Caldwell.

In Illinois nonprofit groups have started the Count Me In campaign, an alliance of 10 foundations in the Chicago metropolitan area that hopes to raise participation in the 2010 census among Illinois residents who are likely to be missed.

Count Me In

In September, the Count Me In project awarded $1.2-million for public-education campaigns and other grass-roots activities.

Recipients included the Gail Borden Public Library District, in Elgin, which will use its $20,000 grant to encourage the city’s rapidly growing Hispanic population to participate in the upcoming census.

The Count Me In project will document and analyze responses to the census in cities and towns served by the grant recipients, says Gretchen Crosby Sims, director of strategic initiatives at the Joyce Foundation, in Chicago.

An approach designed to produce those sorts of quantifiable results appealed to the foundations in Illinois, she says, and alliances in California, Florida, New York, and elsewhere have contacted Count Me In for guidance in setting up similar processes.

“The census is an episodic thing, and up till now there hasn’t been a lot of institutional memory,” says Ms. Sims. “Eight years from now, when we need to be starting this again, we’ll have a record of what does and doesn’t work.”

She adds: “The stakes are very real, very clear, and very big.”