By Carol Morello
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 3, 2010
George Duangmanee is a financial adviser in the District, an immigrant and
an officer in a scholarship program for Asian tennis players. It is the
latter role that has made him a catch for the Census Bureau.
Although he did not bother to mail back his questionnaire for the 2000
Census, he has been sending e-mails touting the 2010 count to 15,000 people
involved in the Thai Tennis Organization. He has enlisted other Thai
organizations to help translate census posters into the Thai language and
promote the tally at thaicensus.org. He is also passing out water bottles
labeled with the 2010 Census logo at Asian festivals in the Washington
region.
"At first, I had no idea what the census is," said Duangmanee, 38, who was
recruited by a census employee hired to approach leaders in communities that
are considered hard to count. "Nobody had ever explained to us how important
it is. I tell people, if you have a kid who goes to school here, it's
important to be counted. Now they understand."
As they prepare for this spring's national count, census officials are
determined to leave no niche behind.
Locally, for example, recruiters have landed representatives of a gay
basketball team, immigrants from a chiefdom in Sierra Leone and a Chinese
acupuncturist. They have appealed to liquor stores and hardware stores,
pizzerias and patisseries, the Nationals and the Mystics, Shakespearean
scholars, the Woodrow Wilson House and even the CIA, asking each to display
posters or a stack of brochures.
"My sense was they were talking to everyone, no matter how remote the
connection to the census," said Gail Kern Paster, director of the Folger
Shakespeare Library, where visitors can pick up a census flier.
This is not the first time the Census Bureau has reached out to groups
considered hard to count: the poor, minorities and recent immigrants. But
for 2010, the bureau has 3,000 employees, five times as many as 10 years
ago, assigned to find "partners" to champion census participation. They have
formed alliances with 136,000 groups, houses of worship and businesses.
States, counties and municipalities eager to secure a share of almost $480
billion in federal funds allotted on census statistics are linking up with
thousands more.
"We're becoming even more diverse than we were 10 years ago," said Wayne
Hatcher, director of the regional census office in Charlotte, which is
responsible for five states, including Virginia. "I have to make a more
concerted effort to find bilingual people and break down the barriers with a
new immigrant population that might not understand the census, that might
even be afraid of the census."
The road tour
For most of the United States, the count will begin April 1. But there will
be a symbolic kickoff in late January when Census Bureau Director Robert
Groves travels to the Alaskan Inupiat village of Noorvik to count the
approximately 600 residents. This week, the bureau will launch 13 vans and
recreational vehicles on a road tour, stopping at parades, festivals and the
Super Bowl to promote the census. It also will unveil a $300 million
advertising campaign this month, momentarily making it one of the biggest
advertisers in the country. And it is preparing to hire 1.2 million people
for temporary jobs that pay $10 to $25 an hour, mostly to knock on doors in
spring and summer and follow up with people who do not mail in their forms.
In the censuses of 1990 and 2000, two of three people responded to the
initial mailing. Urban areas, in particular, have many residents who do not
respond without prodding. In the District, for example, 55 percent of the
residents are considered hard to count. In the 2000 Census, the area with
the lowest response rate of 45 percent was the heavily African American Ward
8, east of the river, while 77 percent responded in affluent Ward 3, in
upper Northwest. That dynamic is replicated across the country. Hoping to
boost participation, the city has compiled a list of almost 400 groups that
have agreed to promote the census.
Many people need little convincing of the importance of the census for their
communities.
"It's a passion of mine," said Juanita Britton, who 10 years ago worked as a
marketer for the Census Bureau and now runs the Anacostia Art Gallery and
Boutique in Southeast. "As a community organizer, I know the value of the
census. I'm in an at-risk community. It's important to educate people that
if we're not counted, the money doesn't come in."
Britton has a sign near the cash register inviting her customers to "Ask us
about the census." She passes out trinkets such as key chains and squeeze
balls that have the census logo.
The Serbian Unity Congress was eager to do its share, if only to get a
better handle on how many Serbs are in the United States. Many Serbs who
fled the former Yugoslavia when it was a communist satellite of the Soviet
Union were reluctant to cooperate with the government-run census, said Ivana
Cerovic, a program director with the group. About 200,000 Serbs were counted
in the 2000 Census; the organization said it thinks there are closer to 1
million.
Today, it has a message about the census on its Web site. It has printed
bilingual brochures with instructions on filling out the questionnaire for
distribution in 140 Serbian Orthodox churches across the United States.
"This is something we've wanted to do for a long time," said Cerovic, who
called the Census Bureau and offered to help.
Diverse constituency
More typically, though, census officials have reached out to groups that
have never been approached.
This summer, a census partnership specialist attended the first national
conference of the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance, said Ben
de Guzman, a Washington-based program director in the group. The group is
distributing census brochures in several Asian languages.
"To the Census Bureau's credit, they have been committed to reach out to as
diverse a constituency as possible," he said. "Ten years ago, there was no
outreach at all to the LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender]
community."
Mohamed Bangura was drawn into census promotion when he met a bureau
employee at an event at the embassy of Sierra Leone. Bangura, who heads the
Koya Progressive Association, a philanthropy made up primarily of people
from the Koya chiefdom in northern Sierra Leone, said he and other groups
intend to lease a hall in March to urge immigrants to be counted.
"We're really trying to motivate people," said Bangura, a science teacher in
the District. "We educate them that it's important to participate because
otherwise, your area may be underfunded."
Census officials, who spend as much as $3,000 to supply each group with
trinkets and banners, are pleased with the program.
"When the ad campaign starts in January, that will be the last push to get
on board and start talking about the census," said Fernando Armstrong,
regional census director in Philadelphia, which covers Maryland and the
District. "In reality, anyone can be a good ambassador, talking about the
census at the grocery store or in church."
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