- It's important, we all know that the 2020 Census,
or the decennial census every decade
is about power, and it's about money.
We talk about power,
it's about congressional representation,
legislative boundaries that are redrawn.
Business decisions that are made when it comes to investing.
Jobs and services, those public funds
that trickle down to the local communities.
We have estimated that more than $675 billion every year
in federal funds actually flows down to local levels.
- One of the things that we
discovered is that Black families, they can be different.
People of different hues,
people of different ages in the household.
There's a diverseness and there's a richness,
and that richness wants to be captured,
people want to tell their story, their story.
And so this is our way of acknowledging, recognizing,
celebrating the diversity in Black households
as they exist today, really as they've always existed.
But bringing them into the light,
and giving them a sense of wanting
to be a part of census participation.
- We will make every effort to count everyone once,
and only once, and in the right place.
The online questionnaire is available in 13 languages,
including French and Haitian Creole.
Our call center will also have operators
available to provide assistance in these languages.
So, these 13 languages represent the languages
spoken in 95% of the households across the country.
And then additionally, we have Language Assistant Guides
that can be found on YouTube as videos,
and on our website in 59 other languages.
- Advertising, advertising is a wonderful thing.
You can do a lot with advertising,
but you can only say so much in a 30-second ad,
or in a one-page ad in the newspaper, there's only so much.
And because it's only so much,
we have to have our partner organizations
and our partnership staff that can provide you
that on the ground, face-to-face, in-depth information.
They can talk to you,
and give you more details around what you hear.
Advertising is the umbrella, we're the air cover,
so that you know what we're talking about,
and that you're more interested to find more about it.
- I work on behalf of the district government,
across all of our agencies and our partners.
We know how critical a full count is to D.C..
Accurate census data ensures that we've
been getting about $6 billion
every single year in federal dollars.
And these dollars support vital programs
that impact every resident in the district,
but they especially impact
some of our most vulnerable populations.
That six billion is funding things such as Medicare,
Medicaid, our school fundings.
Our schools alone are getting close to $250 million
a year in federal allocation,
and that really impacts our communities
through Head Start programming,
school lunch and breakfast programming, Title I dollars,
Special Education, technology for our classrooms.
These have real impacts every single day in the district.
Our D.C. State Data Center estimated that an undercount
in 2010 resulted in an annual loss of $57 million
every year to the district,
so about 570 million between 2010 and 2020 that we lost.
We know every person counts,
every person that's undercounted is money
that we're leaving on the table
that we are entitled to in the district.
- So, what to expect in the mail?
The invitation will go out in the form of a letter,
which will include instructions for responding online,
and a phone number to call is someone needs help.
Or perhaps the person prefers to give their responses
over the phone, our call center
will be there to collect that information.
Of course, there will be segments of the population
who will receive the questionnaire,
as well as the invitation
to respond online in the very first mailing.
- When we talk about safe,
we're talking about the safeguards that we
take to ensure that the responses are kept confidential,
and they aren't shared with anyone.
No other law enforcement agencies, including local police.
All Census Bureau employees take a lifetime oath
to not disclose that personally identifiable information.
And you'll see there that there are penalties for that,
up to $250,000 and up to five years in prison.
- So, the questionnaire contains
only a few simple questions,
such as the number of people in the household,
about each person living in the household,
as well as their relationship to the person
who identifies himself or herself
as person one, and that's just a few.
These questions allow the Census Bureau
to develop data about families, households,
as well as other groups.
And let me just say right now so that we are clear,
there is no question on the form related to citizenship.
Self-identification of race and origin,
so the self-identification question
reflects the most recent revisions
to the standards for the classification
of federal data on race and ethnicity.
So, we asked respondents to respond
or answer both the question about Hispanic origin,
and the question about race.
And origin can be viewed as the heritage,
nationality, lineage, or the country of birth.
And since 2000, the census questionnaire
has allowed individuals to self-identify
with more than one race.
So, the responses to these question help create statistics
about the different ethnic groups,
And the data collected in these questions
are needed by federal agencies to monitor compliance
with anti-discrimination provisions
under the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act.