Encouragement to participate in the Census gets creative during COVID-19 mandates

by Suzanne Hanney

Auto caravans, online dance parties and drag shows are creative responses Illinois nonprofits are using to urge people to fill out the 2020 U.S. Census in the wake of COVID-19 mandates against face-to-face contact.

As of May 7, Illinois was 7th in the nation for self-response, with 62.4 percent of its population counted, compared to the 57.3 percent national average, Illinois census officials said. Because of the pandemic, the self-response phase has been extended from July 31 to October 31; the nonresponse follow-up period, originally set for May 13-July 31, is now August 31-October 31.

Immigrant neighborhoods remain some of the hardest to count, with one reason being the fear of a citizenship status question sought by the Trump administration but struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. Still, census officials say that they’ve seen some significant improvements. State Senate District 11, which includes Little Village, Brighton Park and Garfield Ridge, was at 35 percent in early April and is now at 49 percent.

SGA Youth & Family Services, which works with Latino communities in Pilsen, Back of the Yards, Brighton Park and Little Village and with African Americans in Roseland, switched to social media for outreach when its offices closed in March. On Fridays since then, SGA has partnered with Pilsen Wellness and Pilsen Neighbors Community Council for the caravans, targeted to streets that have been low in census participation.

“Everyone was social distancing, in their closed cars, wearing a mask, creative in decorating their own cars,” said SGA Census Coordinator Diana Perez of a recent Friday that drew 40 vehicles. “We were making a lot of noise so people would be curious and would go to their windows. The point is to remind everyone to fill out the census.”

A Wednesday night dance party on May 6 featured two DJs spinning cumbia and ranchera music, with appearances by state Rep. Karina Villa (D-Batavia) and Oswaldo Alvarez, Illinois census director. Former U.S. Congressman Luis Gutierrez (D- Chicago) spoke on another Facebook Live segment. “He emphasized people have to submit the census,” Perez said. “It goes back to the way the community is funded. If we want a better community, we have to do the census.”

Latinos are 17 percent of the state’s population, but they are also highly represented among typically undercounted people: immigrants, low-income, renters, children under 5, according to the Latino Policy Forum. Since the census determines representation in Congress and spending on federal programs, if Latinos are undercounted, they are also underfunded and underrepresented, according to the Forum.

In an e-blast, the Latino Policy Forum assured its 200 partner organizations about census confidentiality. It has also developed a variation of the Mexican card game Loteria, in which participants match riddle answers to pictures on their game boards. The census Loteria discusses confidentiality, Illinois’s potential loss of a seat in Congress in the wake of an undercount, the census impact on federal spending for education and seniors’ programs and more; it has also been used for Facebook Live events, said communications coordinator Steven Arroyo.

Rather than risk losing more of its Blue State representation in Congress, the state of Illinois is spending $29 million – more per capita than any other state – on education and outreach about census importance. The hub-and-spoke system uses “regional intermediaries” (RIs), or trusted messengers, to reach hard-tocount populations. The YWCA Metropolitan Chicago is one of the grantees and SGA is a subgrantee.

Howard Brown Health Center, another YWCA subgrantee for the LGBTQ+ population, is planning a drag show on Facebook Live with census information during the “commercial breaks,” said Regan Sonnabend, vice president of marketing and communications and census director at the YWCA Metropolitan Chicago.

“They’ve done a remarkable job of doing things that appeal to the masses because there are a lot of people that feel this is a political issue and a snoozefest,” Sonnabend said. “So what Howard Brown has done is made it hip and cool with some of these events, an act of resistance.”

The YWCA and SGA Family & Youth are planning a Boystown census caravan for June, “as something positive and festive,” since the annual Gay Pride Parade has been postponed, she added.

Phone banking is the latest outreach tool, because it can be targeted to specific blocks or census tracts with low participation, whether they are LBGTQ or parents of children under age 5, Sonnabend said. For the former, the nonprofit State Voices has helped access Voter Action Network data on households of same-sex males or females, while for the children, it looks at households of three to 10 people headed by someone age 18 to 35.

Sonnabend pointed to children’s outreach at food pantries in DuPage county that gave people censusbranded, reusable grocery bags and water bottles as well as baseball caps. Similarly, up to 25 StreetWise vendors will wear census logo jackets as they distribute censusbranded water bottles, baseball caps, and census information at the places where they shelter or visit, in order to spread the word among the homeless population.

“We’re giving something to grab people’s attention [so] then they will listen to what you have to say,” she said.