Grant makers are gearing up early to counter Trump administration policies surrounding the 2020 census and raising concerns that the White House plans and a general rise in an anti-immigrant sentiment could distort the results of the crucial once-a-decade population count.
Getting an accurate head count is always tricky, but the administration added another hitch when it decided that for the first time since 1950, the census will ask people if they are U.S. citizens.
“It was challenging before the addition of the citizenship question,” says Gary Bass, executive director of the Bauman Foundation. “It will be even tougher going forward.”
Bass and others cite a number of additional reasons for concern:
- A tighter labor market will make it harder for the Census Bureau to hire people to go door-to-door.
- An effort to do more of the count online is untested and could fall short.
- States with tight budgets may divert money from programs that promote the census and that help localities identify undercounted populations.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing Tuesday to determine if these and other items could hamper the federal government from getting an accurate count.
Group Effort
Anticipating these difficulties, Bauman joined with nine other grant makers, including the Annie E. Casey and Ford foundations and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, to draw up a census game plan. The group, called the Democracy Funders Collaborative Census Subgroup, has pooled more than $5 million since 2016 and developed a three-pronged strategy: attract more philanthropic dollars; support policies like a federal budget increase and additional funding from the states; and assist in efforts to improve the count when the census begins in April 2020.
Other philanthropies are becoming interested. Within days of the citizenship announcement, more than 300 foundation leaders joined a conference call to plot a response, Bass said.
Many grant makers will respond to the addition of the citizenship question by putting a greater emphasis on advocacy and litigation, Bass predicts, although he wasn’t aware of any grants to support court battles.
Several lawsuits have challenged the question’s constitutionality.
The Three Rs
Carrie Davis, director of the Joyce Foundation’s democracy program, said the importance of the census revolves around what she calls the “Three Rs": resources, representation, and redistricting. Formulas for many federal payments to the states to support things like foster care, housing, and school lunches are based on the tally. Likewise, the count determines the number and shape of U.S. House and state legislative districts.
“It all comes down to the census,” Davis says.
Adds Bass: “If we don’t address this now, we’ll pay for it for the next decade.”
Even before the citizenship question was added, foundation leaders were worried that a growing distrust of the government among immigrant communities and minorities would suppress the census count in neighborhoods that are most in need of government services. They began mapping neighborhoods with low response rates in the 2010 census, troubleshooting the technology that will be used for the count, and market-testing foreign-language messages to urge nonnative speakers and their families to be counted.
The Knock at the Door
Extra effort is needed to encourage immigrant families to take part, says Arturo Vargas, executive director of the Naleo Educational Fund, which supports Latino participation in the democratic process. Paradoxically, the “know your rights” advice nonprofits have pushed to help immigrants avoid detention and deportation may now make it harder to get those people to stand up and be counted for the census, he says.
“Many organizations are telling immigrants not to open their doors if someone knocks and that if they say they’re the police to insist on a warrant,” he says. “So if we turn around in a few years and tell people, ‘Hey, if it’s an enumerator, open your doors wide open and tell them everything about yourself,’ it’s not going to work.”
Naleo is pressing legislators in Sacramento to provide more support to local governments to review and amend Census Bureau residential address lists used to prepare for the count. His group will also conduct national and local surveys and focus groups of Hispanic residents to determine which messages can be most effectively used in census marketing campaigns.
An Early Start
Since last year, Vargas says, his organization has received about $2 million for census work from the pooled fund and other, separate foundation grants. Unlike the 2010 census, when grant money started rolling in the year before the count, foundations started organizing well in advance.
“This is the first census I’ve witnessed foundations organizing themselves around the issue so early in the cycle,” says Vargas, who has worked on census issues since the 1990 count. “This time, philanthropy isn’t waiting until the last minute.”
Including the $5 million gathered by the pooled fund, Bass estimates that foundations have committed more than $18.4 million to the 2020 census. He expects that number to reach $40 million by 2020. That’s an increase from the $30 million philanthropy earmarked for the 2010 census, according to a report by the 2010 Funders Census Initiative and Hagedorn Foundation. But Bass says it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison: The 2010 figure also includes general operating-support grants, while figures for the current cycle are for direct census work only.
The Democracy Funders Collaborative Census Subgroup is part of a broader effort by philanthropy to ensure an accurate count. Many of the groups, which include Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees and the Funder Census Initiative 2020 (a working group of the Funders’ Committee for Civic Participation and the United Philanthropy Forum) have overlapping members. Nearly four dozen entities, spanning the political spectrum and including both nonprofits and businesses, lobbied Congress on census issues during the first quarter of the year, according to disclosure forms filed with the U.S. Senate.
The roster includes Naleo, the American Civil Liberties Union, Heritage Action for America, Accenture, General Dynamics, and the Community Foundation Public Awareness Initiative. The listed organizations typically lobby on a number of issues, and disclosure forms don’t break down how much they spend specifically on the census.
The Funders Census Initiative is designed to be a hub of information for foundations that want to support the count. It has mapped the level of philanthropic support nationwide, provides timelines for government census decisions, and hosts webinars and get-togethers to learn and strategize.
It also provides research, including a George Washington University study showing the role of the census in federal budgeting and a mapping project by researchers at the City University of New York that shows hard-to-reach populations nationwide at the neighborhood level.
“It’s a census 101 for donors,” says Alexie Torres-Fleming, the initiative’s co-chair. “We are trying to centralize these tools to make it easier for them to identify priority communities in their state.”
Missed Opportunity
Torres-Fleming is leading an effort in Massachusetts she hopes is replicated throughout the country. She has gathered a number of donors, including the Boston, Hyams, and Herman and Frieda L. Miller foundations and the Episcopal City Mission, to contribute $925,000 to a regional fund. She expects donations will grow to well beyond the original $1 million goal. The money will be used to hire people from the local community to encourage their neighbors to participate, and to hold training and educational forums throughout the state.
If the census is flubbed, it will be a missed opportunity to correct stereotypes with hard data, says Terry Ao Minnis, director of census and voting programs at Asian Americans Advancing Justice. She notes that Asian-Americans are often thought to be above the national average in wealth and education level; an accurate census would help reverse faulty assumptions and pinpoint where Asian-Americans fall behind in those areas.
To get that level of accuracy, the government cannot work alone, she says. Nonprofits can serve as trusted allies of groups that are hard to count, especially during a time when many fear governmental intrusion.
“The messenger is sometimes more important than the message itself,” Ao Minnis says.
