On Monday I wrote a post about how nonprofit organizations, community leaders and foundations are collaborating to reach hard-to-count populations and ensure that their constituents participate in Census 2010. Several important campaigns are taking place in the Bay Area with the financial support of The San Fransisco Foundation, The California Endowment, Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Foundation, James Irvine Foundation and other local foundations. In addition to grant funds, The San Francisco Foundation and The California Endowment are helping grantees to collaborate, strategize and track their efforts.

Yesterday, National Public Radio reported on how major national foundations have also launched intensive campaigns to reach the hard-to-count including the homeless and those who might be uncomfortable participating based on immigration status. National funders of Census 2010 initiatives include The Open Society Institute, Ford Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

As the NPR story reports, Voto Latino came up with innovative ways that link the popularity of the iPhone with young Latinos and incentives for filling out the census form. They developed an iPhone application for Los Angeles County that gives users the opportunity to win music and possibly a free concert if they learn about the census.

Listen to the NPR story:

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Any day you should receive notice in the mail about the 2010 Census. The official questionnaire will follow the initial announcement one week later in mid-March.

The federal government distributes more than $400 billion a year to state, tribal and local governments based on the decennial Census count. And every ten years some states gain seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and some lose, depending on what the Census numbers say about the relative sizes of their populations. The changing numbers require states to redraw Congressional District boundaries.

Yet to the despair of social justice advocates, populations that are most in need of community services, resources and civil rights enforcement have also been the hardest to count. In the Bay Area a number of foundations have helped to mobilize outreach in historically undercounted populations by awarding grants to grassroots organizations with extensive reach in their communities.

When it comes to filling out box #9 with regards to race, advocacy organizations will also play a critical educational role to show how individuals can “self-select” by choosing more than one race or “some other race” to identify as multi-racial or by national origin. For example, some might choose to enter Afghan, Sikh, Maya or Haitian. This widely-syndicated article by the Associated Press describes how some Caribbean-American leaders are urging their communities to write their nationalities on the line under “some other race” on the forms, along with checking the racial categories they feel identify them best.

While the way race is counted is an important evolution in the Census, it remains to be seen how the Census Bureau will tabulate the write-in selections in 2011.

Articles and Resources on Census 2010

• Nonprofits Count!: A project of the Nonprofit Voter Engagement Network, this website provides information, including best practices, on how nonprofit organizations and human services agencies can help produce an accurate count of hard-to-count populations.
• Mapping Hard-to-Count Communities: Hard-to-Count (HTC) populations are groups that may have a higher non-response rate on the 2010 Census. With support from The California Endowment, Healthy Cities has generated a portal through which Census stakeholders may locate communities at risk for undercounting in California.
• Justice Department Confirms Confidentiality of Census Information – March 5, 2010 article by the Washington Post
• The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights
• Census History: Counting Hispanics – March 3, 2010 article by the Pew Hispanic Center
• Census: Battleground for Money and Justice – February 17, 2010 by Blue Avocado
• Most View Census Positively, But Some Have Doubts - February 12, 2010 by The Pew Research Center for the People & The Press
• California Complete Count Committee
• The Census Project Blog: A collaboration of state and local governments, civil rights and labor groups, housing and child advocates, businesses, professional societies, and research organizations interested in a fair and accurate Census 2010
• Brookings Institution Census Information

Grantmaker Initiatives

• Census 2010 Grants Will Bring Visibility to Hard-to-Count Populations – The San Francisco Foundation
• New York Foundations Push to Get Accurate Census Count – Philanthropy News Digest
• Private foundations offer millions to ensure accurate census count – Contra Costa Times
• The California Endowment has awarded nearly 11,000 grants across California totaling more than $1.9 billion.

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Today I read a new post by blogger Amy Gahran on the News Leadership 3.0 blog of the Knight Digital Media Center (a project of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism). Her article reminded me of how easy it is for changemakers to embed third party widgets and gadgets into their blogs and Web pages to promote civic engagement through volunteering.

In addition to the widgets the author describes in the article – SearchLite by VolunteerMatch, Dosomething.org and Volunteering in America by widgetbox – another widget I recently discovered is made by All for Good, a project of Our Good Works. All for Good makes an open source application that allows you to find and share volunteer activities. I initially discovered the All for Good tool on Serve.gov, a site set up in response to President Obama’s call for Americans to get out and serve in their communities. The volunteer database is driven by All for Good.

According to the All for Good Web site, the project is driven by volunteers from Google, Craigslist Foundation, UCLA, YouTube, FanFeedr and Aha! Ink. As a contributor, Google is hosting the All for Good website and products.

After making a few selections for place, colors and time frame – voila! – here is a dynamic listing of volunteer opportunities available for this week in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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In December, I found a tall stack of Greg Mortenson’s new book, Stones into Schools, in a local bookstore after hearing of its release. This book (currently #5 on the New York Times best seller list) picks up where Three Cups of Tea (a book that has sold 3.5 million copies in 41 countries) left off, yet Stones into Schools stands alone and tells a gripping chronicle of what it is like to bring educational opportunities to rural communities in war torn Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is a story that weaves history, landscape and inspirational accounts of bravery and fortitude as Mortenson, his team and villagers work to do what seems, oftentimes, impossible.

Yesterday, PBS stations aired Bill Moyers in conversation with Greg Mortenson. In addition to illuminating the plight of the Central Asia Institute (CAI) and the new book, the interview gives you the chance to hear Mortenson’s views on the deployment of 30,000 new troops to Afghanistan, a decision President Obama announced on December 1, 2009. To this end, one of Moyer’s questions to Mortenson was: “It costs us a million dollars a year to keep one soldier there. That’s $30 billion for the new 30,000 troops. How many schools could you build with that?” Mortenson responded, with “$1 million we could build 30 or 40 schools. And in one generation we could have over 20,000, 30,000 kids educated.”

Not to miss, one highlight of the interview came after Moyers asked Mortenson about the “men who showed up in black.” Mortenson described their goal of building a girl’s school in a Taliban-led region notorious for opposing education of girls. In an effort to gain approval, he invited the province’s elders to one of CAI’s schools. Mortenson described the visit as one where men “armed to the teeth” spent an hour and a half playing on the schools swings and slides. During the show, they flashed a photo of these men swinging while laughing and smiling. Later, after gathering for a village meeting, the elders said: “We want to start this school. Of course we want the playground built first.”

Watch the video on the Bill Moyers Journal Web site and read the transcript here.

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