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 $435 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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Earlier today, President Obama signed an Executive Order to create the White House Council on Women and Girls.

The mission of the council will be to provide a coordinated federal response to the challenges confronted by women and girls and to ensure that all Cabinet and Cabinet-level agencies consider how their policies and programs impact women and families.

According to the National Alliance for Partnerships in Equity, the actions of over 40 national organizations–including the National Alliance for Partnerships in Equity and the NAPE Education Foundation influenced the decision. They called for the reestablishment of critical women’s programs in the executive branch. In December, these organizations sent a letter to the Obama transition team, requesting that the new administration restore and strengthen all offices that in past administrations have played a fundamental role in protecting and advancing women’s issues and opportunities.

White House Council on Women and Girls
White House announcement

Opportunities their mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers never dreamed of” – The White House blog

Obama’s Council on Women and Girls – Article in the New York Times

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In recent months, nonprofit presses in Berkeley have released new books that highlight diverse Bay Area neighborhoods and unexpected ways communities come together.

In September, Heyday Books, publishers of books about California history, arts, and culture, released “Under the Dragon – California’s New Culture.” The book is also the subject of a new Oakland Museum exhibit called “Trading Traditions” beginning in January 2008. Written by locals Lonny Shavelson and Fred Setterberg, Under the Dragon follows the lives of a diversity of Bay Area communities while capturing the poignancy of individual struggle in a way that goes beyond the personal. The stories are raw and authentic, and the photographs are stunning.

Another nonprofit Berkeley-based publisher, New Village Press, is celebrating revered community activists at a launch party on December 9, 2007 for “Building Commons and Community” by the late Karl Linn and “Undoing the Silence: Six Tools for Social Change Writing” by Louise Dunlap. The event will be held from 3:00 to 6:00 pm at the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists (BFUU) Hall at Cedar and Bonita Streets, and is co-sponsored by the BFUU Social Justice Committee and the NorCal Chapter of Architects/ Designers/ Planners for Social Responsibility. Speakers will include Louise Dunlap and Karl Linn’s longtime friend and colleague, Carl Anthony.

For over 40 years, Linn devoted himself to bringing people together in the spirit of reclaiming what he called “neighborhood commons,” creating urban oases, combined park-playground projects from vacant and blighted plots of land.

Linn, who grew up on a farm in Germany before his family was forced to flee Nazi persecution, worked as a child therapist and later established a distinguished landscape architecture practice in New York. By the late 1950s, he had decided to devote his career to social justice, teaching, and creating these neighborhood commons.

In the late 1980s, when Linn retired to Berkeley, he helped found the Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility and the Urban Habitat Program at Earth Island Institute. In 1993, Linn’s wife Nicole Milner, environmental justice activist Carl Anthony, and others banded together to convince Berkeley officials to name a city-owned community garden after Linn.

Soon thereafter, Linn teamed up with a UC Berkeley professor, her students, local craftspeople, and neighbors to rejuvenate the dilapidated garden, located in Berkeley’s Westbrae neighborhood. The Karl Linn Community Garden’s transformation inspired the creation of the nearby Peralta and Northside community gardens, the demonstration home known as the Berkeley EcoHouse, and a natural and human history project along the adjacent Ohlone greenway.

A Web site on Linn’s life and work can be found at www.karllinn.org.

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In October, the New York Times published an op-ed article called “The Green-Collar Solution” by journalist Thomas L. Friedman. The piece is about Van Jones’ crusade to bring economic opportunities to disadvantaged communities through job training in emerging and expanding environmental businesses.

Jones, a social justice leader in the Bay Area, has also become a prominent national advocate and voice for underserved and low-income communities that have not had opportunities to participate in the growing green economy. He serves on several advisory boards for environmental groups as well as the new Tipping Point Community, an anti-poverty philanthropic organization founded in 2005 in San Francisco.

With other environmental leaders, Jones recently created a national partnership called “Green For All” to bring “green collar” jobs to urban areas across the country.

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