Census officials want to make survey count

DONNA MELTON
November 15, 2009

With some $450 billion on the line, accurate census counts count.

Organizations, communities and volunteers are joining forces to promote the 2010 census count using innovative measures and lots of legwork to ready residents for the population survey.

The census data plays a role in determining how many state and federal lawmakers will represent an area, where new schools, hospitals and highways will be built and where businesses will expand.

It also determines how much of the $450 billion federal funding cities and counties will share.

Traycee Scott-Williams, partnership specialist for the U.S. Census Bureau, rallies volunteers in 12 South Mississippi counties.

The bureau helps out some with promotion on the local level, but the bulk of the effort and financing is left to the volunteers.

Scott-Williams talks up the census to local organizations, schools and businesses, and at government functions and in churches.

Supervisors in Harrison, Hancock and Jackson counties are organizing Complete Count Committees, which will monitor and plan census education activities. Gulfport held a kickoff celebration to promote the census in August and Moss Point plans one for December. Lucedale and Purvis are hosting census floats in Christmas parades and tossing promotional items.

Parades, fairs and other public gatherings are helping promote the census inexpensively, Scott-Williams said.

The best way to do it is to have it in conjunction with something else that they are doing, she said.

In the last census , Leroy Johnson, executive director of Southern Echo, said statewide returns were 66 percent, while it was just a tad more in South Mississippi at 68 percent.

Southern Echo, a community empowerment organization based in Jackson, is pushing for a 100 percent return.

Johnson believes many Mississippians were skipped in 2000 because they were never delivered a questionnaire. Their volunteers are canvassing areas to get accurate addresses that will be matched to the bureau s list, he said.

We can catch them on the front end and the back end, and when we do that on both ends we ll have a much higher count in 2010, he said. For every person who wasn t counted, the census says that s $12,000 lost in actual revenue that could come to the community because of that demographic. We re talking about millions of dollars lost across the state.

Alisha Johnson of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance is also using its resources, volunteers and community representatives like pastors, caseworkers and school teachers to help spread the word about the importance of being counted.

Every 10 years the stakes are high for communities of color, people with lower incomes and people with limited English proficiency, she said.

Johnson said these groups will continue to be missed until there is intentional and organized effort to educate and mobilize hard-to-count communities to accurately complete forms and return them.

The Mississippi Census Stakeholders Alliance, a partnership between Southern Echo, MIRA, the Mississippi Delta Catalyst Roundtable and the Mississippi American Civil Liberties Union, hosted a free statewide workshop in October with at least 250 participants.

While the bureau is putting much of its promotional funding toward areas that are low income, minority, immigrant and homeless, its goal is to reach everyone in 2010, said Kat A. Smith, media specialist with the Dallas Regional Census Center.

We count everyone. We target the entire country, she said. We are attempting a nationwide awareness program to reach all individuals who are not aware of the importance of the count. Even some highly educated and affluent residents fail to return their forms.

While getting a complete count is important for funding and infrastructure, it is also important on a higher level to get the forms back quickly.

For every 1 percent increase in the national mail response rate, the bureau saves about $85 million, said James Christy, regional director of the Los Angeles bureau office.

Provided By: The McClatchy Company
Index Terms: U.S. Census Bureau; Mississippi American Civil Liberties Union
Location(s): South Mississippi; Jackson; Los Angeles
Personal Name(s): Leroy Johnson; Alisha Johnson; James Christy
Record Number: 200911150000_BI- census ---34952236
Copyright (c) 2009 The Sun Herald