Private foundations offer millions to ensure accurate census count
By Matt O'Brien
Contra Costa Times
Posted: 12/27/2009 12:00:00 AM PST
Updated: 12/27/2009 07:40:04 AM PST

OAKLAND -- With the state strapped for cash, a crew of about 20 private foundations has pumped $9 million into outreach efforts designed to help the Bay Area and all of California get counted properly in the 2010 U.S. Census.

The charities say they have awarded grants to more than 125 community organizations that have intimate connections to people the U.S. Census Bureau had difficulty counting in the past. The list of hard-to-reach residents includes immigrants who do not speak English, college students, people who live in crowded or inaccessible housing, people who move frequently and those who might be wary of authorities.

Grant recipients range from Fremont's Afghan Coalition to the Bananas baby-sitting network of Berkeley to the NAACP of eastern Contra Costa County.

"We are funding a lot of networks of trusted messengers who can get the word out," said Cathy Cha of the San Francisco-based Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund. "Those are the kinds of relationships the government doesn't do well."

The once-a-decade count of every American is fast approaching, but California has little money to spend to make sure all its residents get counted. The stakes are also high: Results are used to draw the boundaries of congressional districts and to determine how much federal money cities and counties will get over the next 10 years.

The state spent about $24 million on outreach in 2000 but has just about $2 million for the effort this time around, said Louis Stewart of the governor's 2010 California Complete Count Committee.

The federal government has filled some of that gap through stimulus money, but the Census Bureau does not directly pay nonprofit community groups for projects or labor. Most of the federal money is spent on hiring local census staff and in-kind costs -- printing "Be Counted" signs and other promotional materials that nonprofit groups can distribute to their members.

"They're trying to be very careful. The bureau, quite frankly, is afraid of associations with certain groups," said Ted Wang, a consultant working with the California foundations. "They want to be as mainstream as possible, not to offend anybody, because they have to count everybody."

Foundations are less timid because they are not taxpayer-funded, and they are putting their money where they think it will have the highest impact -- whether it's for a mural, a prayer breakfast, a skilled community organizer or an event for the homeless, who often get overlooked in census counts. Unlike federal census workers, the grantees do not help residents fill in the census forms, but they can tell them how important it is to do so and push them to the right place.

"The main reason for the undercount is not that people don't want to participate, it's that people don't get the questionnaire in the mail," Wang said.

Local funders that have joined the private campaign include the Moraga-based Y & H Soda Foundation, the Oakland-based Akonadi Foundation and several organizations in San Francisco including the James Irvine Foundation, the San Francisco Foundation, the Mitchell Kapor Foundation and the Walter Alexander Gerbode Foundation.

"It's really unprecedented in terms of all of us coordinating and chipping in," said Cha, of the Haas Jr. Fund.

The funders are distributing money directly to community groups that will use them for projects in the coming weeks and months. The Census Bureau begins mailing out its questionnaires to every household in mid-March.

Armed with a $10,000 grant from the San Francisco Foundation, the East Bay health organization La Clinica de la Raza will train bilingual student volunteers at Mt. Diablo High School next month. The teens will be tasked to reach out to the Spanish-speaking immigrant community living in Concord's Monument corridor. When the census is over, they will get mini-scholarships of up to $300 for their work.

"We want to make sure people are not afraid of the census," said coordinator Maria Reyes of La Clinica.

In many cases, the grantees were chosen because they can overcome language barriers. In other cases, they will overcome fears of an intrusive federal government. The Oakland-based Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California hopes to do both with a grant from the San Francisco Foundation to reach out to local Muslims who speak Farsi or Pashto.

"The census is so bread-and-butter basic," said center spokesman Jason Hamza van Boom. "This is a good way to kind of heal wounds and build up some more trust."

Although it is the government's job to count every resident, and the duty of every resident to participate, the foundations say they have important motivations to help the cause. Many of them focus their charities on California's poorest residents, who can be some of the hardest to count and face the worst impacts if there is a miscount.

The government uses census statistics to determine how much money each region gets for programs such as food stamps, school lunches, foster care, housing vouchers, unemployment insurance and economic development grants.

"If a county or region or a neighborhood is not counted completely, and they don't get the money they need, they will probably be coming to foundations for help," said Navin Moul of the San Francisco Foundation. The foundation has donated about $500,000 to grass roots groups doing census outreach in the Bay Area.

The foundations also have expressed concerns about California's political representation. Because the state's population has grown steadily since 2000, the state should end up with the same number of representatives to Congress after the 2010 census is tabulated. If there is a severe miscount, however, the state could lose a congressional district to faster-growing states or those that do a better job counting themselves.

"We all have a stake in this, we all recognized it and we all came together around the census," said Gigi Barsoum, program officer for The California Endowment, a health-focused foundation headquartered in Los Angeles. The endowment has spent about $4 million on statewide census outreach, the largest individual contribution so far.

The initiative began earlier this year, said Barsoum, when her fund and a few others realized economic troubles and the rash of foreclosures could lead to a miscount. They approached a Sebastopol-based group called Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees and asked for help. Soon, a coalition of funders was born.

Federal officials say they are pleased about the private push, since it will help them leverage their reach throughout the state.

"The foundations looked at the landscape and really tapped into our hardest-to-count communities," said Lia Bolden, a regional official for the Census Bureau. "It's a good thing and it's nice to have them at the table in a very committed way."

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