The Central New York Community Foundation awarded a nonprofit $15,000 earlier this month to support efforts to increase Syracuse representation in the 2020 census.

The grant, awarded to Interfaith Works, is one of five recent donations from the Community Foundation, Syracuse’s largest charitable donor. All of the grants are meant to improve census outreach to undercounted groups, such as children, older adults and new United States citizens.

Interfaith Works has focused much of its approach on including these groups.

“Our goal with that really is to help populations that are hard to reach and hard to count become more educated about the census,” said Lori Klivak, Interfaith Works’ director of senior services.

Census data is used to distribute more than $675 billion in federal funding to local municipalities and to allocate proportional state representation in Congress.

New York state lost two congressional seats from the 2010 census. Small subdivisions in Syracuse, or census tracts, are notoriously unresponsive, according to Center for Urban Research at City University of New York. Groups like the Community Foundation and Interfaith Works are aiming to change that.

“It continues to look like population is declining in Syracuse, and from everything we can tell, the population is actually increasing,” said Robyn Smith, the Community Foundation’s director of strategic initiatives. “We just want to make sure that those numbers are accurate.”

Undercounted communities depend more critically on federally funded programs because of barriers they face, Klivak said. 

For Klivak, having representatives who reflect the needs of refugees is a part of teaching refugees about community engagement. Because of this case, workers at Interfaith Works prioritize building mutual trust between the two groups, she said.

“The challenge and the reward will be in seeking out those people and figuring out how to support them so that they can be counted as well,” Klivak said.

Twiggy Billue, president of Syracuse’s national action network, pointed out that both work and incompatible public transportation have previously prevented people from participating.

“I can well be off (of work) at five,” she said. “But if there’s no bus that’s bringing me home from Buckley Road to the City of Syracuse, I might not get here in time to see a census worker.”

The upcoming census will be mostly recorded digitally in a recent push for efficient accessibility. Still, the tech transition may inadvertently exclude already overlooked communities in Syracuse, according to Interfaith Works and the Community Foundation. Tracts where fewer households have internet access tend to overlap with tracts expressing low mail response rates, according to a data project by CUNY’s Center for Urban Research.

Older, isolated adults may have fewer informed experiences with online platforms and may therefore be less willing to share information online, Klivak said. 

For Interfaith Works, using the Community Foundation’s funds to engage these issues in educational workshops will be a major factor in their work to increase census response rates.

In an unprecedented move for Syracuse, the Complete Count Committee was established earlier this year with the aid of the Community Foundation. The committee is working to ensure everyone in Syracuse is counted in the 2020 census. 

A committee member herself, Syracuse Census Coordinator Tory Russo said she was optimistic about the move.

“(It’s) giving everyone a voice and a chance to say ‘This is who I am, and this is my community, and this is the way that I want to contribute to my community,’” Russo said. 

The Community Foundation is supporting other organizations in central New York that are looking to improve the census, including Jubilee Homes of Syracuse, the New York Immigration Coalition, Tomorrow’s Neighborhoods Today and the New York State Census Equity Fund.

“I am proud that the community foundation took an initiative to be able to do this,” said Billue, “because, sometimes, we see that in order to affect change, we can’t depend on the government’s resources to be able to do it alone.”

Published on September 17, 2019 at 11:10 pm

Contact Marnie: ammunozc@syr.edu