By Pilar Marrero /Ethnic Media Services
San Mateo County has achieved the highest census response rate in California by working with local organizations that know their communities well and creating messages specifically for those communities.
That massive work and effort was carried out by trusted messengers and "on the ground" messengers throughout the county, and was funded by more than $$1.3 million in state and county money, officials said June 30 this year during a teleconference hosted by Ethnic Media Services.
San Mateo County has achieved a 72.8% autoresponder in the 2020 Census, higher than the state average: 62.9%, and the nation's: 61.8%.
That means that nearly three out of four county residents have already filled out the population questionnaire, well before the door-to-door visits by census enumerators, which are scheduled to begin in mid-July in some parts of the U.S. and in August for the rest of the country.
San Mateo County is located in the Bay Area of the San Francisco Peninsula, between the cities of San Francisco and Palo Alto, and is made up of very diverse communities, and the high number of self-sponsors varies widely. Some cities in the county, such as Pescadero and East Palo Alto, are far behind in the count, according to local groups.
Megan Gosh, census management analyst for the San Mateo County Office of Community Affairs, said the county began working on the project to boost census responses in January 2018.
"We had a lot of challenges: 13 of San Mateo's 20 cities have a combination of factors, having a census history listed as 'hard to count,' as well as having unincorporated areas throughout the county," he said.
Hard-to-count groups include renters, people who reside there but are non-citizens and have limited English proficiency, and children under 5, he added. California, in general, is a hard state to count.
The lack of affordable housing in the county results in many addresses not being known to the Census Bureau because they are tied to "non-traditional" housing units, such as converted garages and recreational vehicles. In other cases, people living in rural areas do not receive letters or questionnaires because the Census Bureau does not mail them to P.O. Box addresses, on which most rural residents depend.
"We've worked with the city's urban planners and local organizations to go around the areas with those non-traditional housing units to add their addresses to the master census list," Gosh said.
That county project was able to add 2,000 addresses to the census master records. Using a conservative number of two people per household, those additions would have resulted in $$4 million per year for the county because population counts are tied to the distribution of federal and state resources. The results are also used to create voting districts that are intended to ensure political representation for all communities.
Counts that result in fewer than the actual number tend to reduce that representation.
Gosh and other county and community leaders described the more than two-year effort to get up close and personal with those communities and the things that motivate them, sometimes having to shift focus to tailor messages and convince people to participate in the census.
"For example, we learned that tenants living in Daly City did not want to participate in the census because of a lack of trust in sharing their information," explained Melissa Vergara, a census specialist for San Mateo County.
"So we created a printed message to hang on the doors of homes that specifically touched on the issue of confidentiality laws that apply to the census."
Other areas are receiving "hyper-targeted" messaging through social media campaigns and postcode-based online ads, as well as video and bus stop billboards. It also helped to have promotion through religious congregations and in different languages, depending on the local ethnic composition.
Creativity and flexibility are key parts of the strategies local organizations have used. Rita Mancera, executive director of Puente de la Costa Sur in Pescadero, said her community was badly undercounted during the 2010 census, and said that "no single platform works" to reach everyone.
"The 2010 census counted 2,019 residents in our community, but we knew we had served at least 1,600 people, so we estimated we had between 5,000 and 6,000 residents, most of whom had not been counted," Mancera said. She estimates that approximately only 33% of the community was counted in 2010. So far this year, Pescadero's response rate is 46.1%. "And it was very difficult to get to that," she adds.
Many immigrant residents are simply distrustful because of their experience in their home countries, Mancera says. But the organization has used its relationship with those communities and families to get them to participate in the census.
"We give help to about 200 households every Thursday, encouraging them to use the phones to respond to the census," he explained.
"We hired a person to call about 250 families, who we had sent school supplies to last year, to let them know that we could help them respond to the census over the phone. There's also a lot of informal communication.
Another example of how a motivated community, working with a trusted local organization, can exceed expectations, as was also the case in Pacifica, a city where the autoresponder rate has been higher than that of San Carlos, a neighboring and more prosperous city.
"We've taken advantage of the trust they have in us," said Anita Rees, executive director of Pacifica Resource Center.
"Our organization has been serving the area for 45 years. This is a passionate community, sometimes divided on certain issues, but the census has become a common theme. For us, the message that the census is the way they're going to make themselves heard has worked, plus, the community is competitive: they wanted to beat San Carlos."
Outreach to the Asian community has been very targeted, said Nina Li, San Mateo County's outreach coordinator. More than 30% of the county's population is Asian. Chinese, Tagalog and Hindi are the most widely spoken languages other than Spanish.
Immigration status has been key to reaching out to diverse Asian populations, in addition to language, said Li, who like many people in her community is a legal permanent resident, but not a citizen, and is experiencing her first decennial census.
"In our community, for many people this is a new concept, and they have the misconception that this is similar to an election where you have to be a citizen to participate, but that's not the case," Li said.
Li says that in their promotional activities they have used We Chat, a popular social networking platform in Asia, and targeted messages to permanent residents and even those on temporary visas.
"I'm not a citizen, but I go to parks and libraries, I use public transportation and my daughter is going to public schools, and all of these services will be impacted by the 2020 census for the next 10 years," she said. "We're making sure people know that."
Lisa Tealer, executive director of the Bay Area Community Health Advisory Council, said African Americans, Latinos and others in East Palo Alto are responding to the idea of reclaiming the power of "being counted," a phrase that historically has had negative connotations because, in the past, the census has been used to discriminate against some communities.
"Now we claim it as our power, and we want to be counted because we helped build this country," Tealer said.
Similarly, residents of the Pacific Islander community respond to the idea that the census is a way to secure resources for the next generation, according to Talavoy Aumavae, leader of the Committee for a Count.
Completed by the Pacific Islanders of San Mateo County.
"We highlight the fact that our ancestors had migrated here for better opportunities for their families, and it is imperative that we see the relationship between the census response and our futures," Aumavae said.
