When cities like Lowell, Fitchburg and Leominster were starting to prepare last year for ways to remind residents to respond to the 2020 U.S. Census, they had in mind fun events with activities and giveaways — tactics that are usually pretty successful in raising response rates.
But then the coronavirus pandemic hit, and the municipalities and the community organizations they partner with for those efforts had to pivot to more socially distanced outreach methods, such as phone banks and social-media campaigns.
“COVID has completely thrown a wrench into everything, and it’s specifically impacting this. When you consider the funding into these programs will be impacted for the next 10 years, that’s a challenge,” said Shaun McCarthy, director of the Working Cities Lowell Initiative, part of the Lowell Complete Count Coalition, which includes about 50 area organizations.
“It’s hard when you can’t really pull a crowd together,” said Joan David, executive administrative assistant to Fitchburg Mayor Stephen DiNatale and the lead for the Fitchburg Complete COunt Committee.
Both cities mailed postcards out to residents, left fliers in high-traffic community areas, hung up banners and bought billboard advertising. They worked with local media to produce radio and TV spots in different languages, sent Reverse 911 calls and texts and distributed lawn signs. They partnered with community and faith-based organizations to get the word out in as many ways as possible. McCarthy said even U.S. Rep. Lori Trahan and her staff assisted with phone-banking.
Fitchburg-based Making Opportunity Count (formerly the Montachusett Opportunity Council) received a state grant to assist Fitchburg, Leominster and Gardner with census outreach and has been working on those efforts since the fall, according to MOC Senior Vice President Tricia Pistone.
She said MOC clients are typically from under-served and under-represented communities, “so we want to make sure all the clients we serve have the information necessary to respond to the census.”
MOC has been coordinating with such organizations as the United Way of North Central Massachusetts, NewVue Communities and the Spanish American Center to find the best ways to engage with residents, Pistone said. However, the pandemic halted much of the direct outreach they had planned, including using grant funds to buy tablets so their staff and other agencies could do direct enrollment, she said.
MOC, which serves more than 7,000 households annually, added census information to its weekly check-ins with clients, sent fliers out through its expanded Meals on Wheels program, and provided resources to other partners and food pantries so they could engage their clients about the census, too, Pistone said.
Through its partnership with the United Way, she said MOC was able to develop a print and social-media strategy to reach residents. In recent weeks, that has included sharing pictures of residents in the community filling out the census.
“We really want people to identify with their neighbors, as in, ‘My neighbor did it, I should do it as well,’ ” Pistone said.
They’ve also been sending information out through schools, libraries, health centers, public housing, local childcare operators and businesses.
David said Fitchburg Access Television taped a public-service announcement video with DiNatale and Trahan, and another PSA featuring community members with messages in different languages. Fitchburg is also planning to do a parade of public-safety vehicles through the census tracts that have the lowest response rates, and Leominster and Gardner may do the same, Pistone said.
The lower census tracts in Fitchburg — including the downtown area and north of Main Street — still have self-response rates less than 50%, which is particularly concerning, Pistone said.
Normally, the deadline for the census is in October, but the current administration has moved it to the end of September, meaning an important month is lost — and it’s during a pandemic, when census workers need to go door-knocking, Pistone said.
She said the pandemic is also impacting the counts on college campuses, where students would typically be counted in the census.
“It is sort of a crisis,” Pistone said. “If we are not counting all our people, then we risk a loss of a congressional seat, and we lose the opportunity of a lot of federal dollars that can come in to support our fire, our police, our school systems and the overall function of health care of our communities.”
She said Massachusetts already lost one congressional seat following the 2010 census, when it went from 10 to nine U.S. representatives based on census responses.
McCarthy, who co-led the efforts in Lowell with city Director of Economic Development Christine McCall, said they want to make sure everybody in the city gets counted accurately, including the different racial and ethnic communities, so services can reach those communities in the ways they need.
“An accurate census count dictates how a lot of federal funds will get sent to the city,” McCall said. “So it’s really important we get an accurate count, and the more self-response we have makes it easier for census enumerators, so we’re encouraging people to respond on their own and avoid a census enumerator knocking on their door.”
This week, census enumerators began making the rounds to residences that did not respond, knocking on doors in an attempt to get responses from those who forgot, weren’t aware of the census or chose not to respond for a number of reasons.
“What I’m hoping is that the work we’ve done has set up the enumerators to be able to get out and finish up and help Lowell get a good response,” McCarthy said.
As of Friday afternoon, Lowell’s self-response rate was 57.7%, with 46.9% of total responses done online. The city is still lagging behind its 2010 census self-response rate of 62.9%.
In the Twin Cities of North Central Massachusetts, the numbers were slightly higher. Fitchburg’s self-response rate was 62%, with 49.7% done online, still behind its 2010 self-response rate of 64.6%. Leominster was even higher at 69.7%, with 59.3% done online, inching closer to its 2010 self-response rate of 70.1%.
In the more affluent suburbs surrounding the cities, self-response rates were much higher: Ashburnham 67.1%, Ashby 75.2%, Ayer 72.5%, Billerica 78.9%, Chelmsford 81.8%, Dracut 77%, Dunstable 86.2%,Groton 79.8%, Harvard 83.2%, Lancaster 71.3%, Littleton 83.1%, Lunenburg 75.7%, Pepperell 77.9%, Shirley 70.5%, Tewksbury 77.8%, Townsend 80.9%, Tyngsboro 80.2%, Westford 82.5%, Westminster 77%, Wilmington 81.4%.
McCall said responding to the census is easier than ever this year, because it’s the first time the census can be done online, in addition to the mail and phone options. Still, there are parts of Lowell with self-response rates under 50%: the Acre, downtown, a portion of the Highlands, Back Central and Centralville are all hovering between 43% and 48%.
‘We find that reaching our hard-to-count communities, you have to meet people where they’re at, and so we’re trying to make it as easy as possible for people to respond,” McCall said.
In Lowell, census Mobile Questionnaire Assistance operations have gone out to different parts of the city to reach more people, including COVID-19 testing sites, community and school food pantries and at City Hall. McCall said they’ll also be available at early voting sites soon.
Sovanna Pouv, executive director of the Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association in Lowell, said the agency is doing what it can to increase response rates around the city, especially in the Khmer community.
“It’s not going up as fast as we would like it to be, to be honest with you,” Pouv said. “It’s one of those challenges, we would look at it as an opportunity. Social media can only go so far.”
He said CMAA hosted a virtual town hall with area Khmer leaders to discuss the importance of the census and worked with Lowell TeleMedia Corp. to create instructional videos in multiple languages. They’ve been giving out food packages with census information in English and Khmer, distributing census logo fans to people waiting outside for COVID testing, and taking every opportunity they can to inform residents of both the census and the upcoming election.
The organization also hired a full-time civic engagement and organizing coordinator, Vanmey Ma, who is tasked with building a team of young people to assist with canvassing, phone-banking and other outreach efforts.
Ma said it’s important to try to increase the response rates as much as possible, “because money is on the line.”
“It’s more than just, ‘Oh, you live at 18 Apple Street’ or whatever,” she said. “It’s about getting the right funding for schools and getting state representation in government.”
Ma said Cambodian and Black, Indigenous and people of color communities are historically undercounted, often due to a lack of resources and low-income people being too busy working to consider things like the census.
That is why it’s important for the CMAA and the other organizations it works with to set a solid foundation and educate people on these topics, she said.
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Despite COVID setbacks, cities try their best to raise census response rates - Sentinel & Enterprise
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