WASHINGTON – The decades-old challenge of counting the U.S. population will be met by more than 1,000 national and local organizations gearing up for the U.S. 2010 Census.
WASHINGTON – The decades-old challenge of counting the U.S. population will be met by more than 1,000 national and local organizations gearing up for the U.S. 2010 Census.
As partners, these groups will tailor messages to their members, particularly the underserved and hard to reach populations, that being counted is empowering.
Several hundred representatives from national and local, community and faith-based organizations, media, businesses and schools met in D.C. earlier this week for an exclusive briefing hosted by the Census Bureau. In addition to hearing discussions about the challenges and successes of past Census counts, the bureau launched its appeal to broaden its partnership base with groups that will raise awareness and encourage participation in the 2010 Census.
Since 1990, the U.S. Census Bureau has engaged groups representing African-Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans and Asians to put a familiar face to the massive number of heads to be counted. The challenge has been an enormous task because vast numbers of Americans have historically avoided the count.
“Our readers have to get beyond fear,” said Karen Love, of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, a trade association of more than 160 Black-owned newspapers across the country. As a member of the media panel representing a diverse group of newspaper, radio, television and public relations firms, Love said a lot of work would need to be done to dispel the myths built around the census.
“For years, the Native American community held on to its distrust of the government,” explained Jacqueline Johnson Pata, executive director of the National Congress of American Indians. “At the turn of the century, the government census taker determined whether Native Americans were civilized or uncivilized Americans,” Pata said, which in turn has lead to a massive undercount of the country’s tribal communities.
In 2000, when the Census partnered with Native American tribal leaders, it helped to engage more members on the ground. “Enumerators make the difference,” she said. “They are the people on the ground and the ones who the community knows and trusts.”
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Copyright 2009 Special to the NNPA from the Washington Informer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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