Beyond The Count: Leveraging The 2010 Census To Build New Capacities For Civic Engagement And Social Change In California

A report by Jennifer Ito, Barbara Masters, Rhonda Ortiz, and Manuel Pastor

Funded by the California Endowment

(From the Executive Summary)

From San Diego to Stockton, over two hundred community centers, health clinics,
community organizing groups, and others opened questionnaire assistance centers, knocked on doors, trained census workers, and produced public service announcements to ensure that everyone in California would be included in the Census 2010 count. Infused with over nine million dollars from seventeen private and community foundations, organizations trained and deployed volunteers to homeless camps, neighborhoods with high rates of formerly incarcerated people, and communities hosting limited-English proficient immigrant households ranging from Afghans to Africans and Slavics to Southeast Asians.

The immediate success of the Census 2010 outreach effort in California is partially reflected in the census data – which the U.S. Census Bureau began releasing in May 2011. With organizations, public agencies, and foundations working together, California’s numbers were up, partly because Los Angeles led the nation’s large cities in the census response and partly because the undercount was lower in rural areas than in years past. Organizations tapped into trust built over many years to convince immigrants and ex-offenders, otherwise fearful and mistrustful of government, to complete and send in the survey. Community-based organizations teamed up with national advocacy groups and government agencies to develop tailored strategies for outreaching to Cambodians, Central Americans, and migrant farmworkers. And funders found a way to stretch their dollars and reach neighborhoods in all ten counties with the highest numbers of hard-to-count populations.

While this is all to be celebrated, we focus in this report on the ways in which the Census
2010 effort may produce even more significant impacts down the road. The process of
ensuring an accurate count itself strengthened and seeded new civic engagement capacities among a diverse array of organizations across the state. Many organizations, like CausaJusta::Just Cause in the Bay Area and Inner City Struggle in East Los Angeles, intentionally leveraged Census 2010 outreach to scale up their contact lists, train leaders in phonebanking, and develop new partnerships. Others, like some direct service providers and community centers, also found staff and volunteers engaging with clients in new ways that could carry into future advocacy efforts.

To keep reading, go to the full report.