Oxnard: Census Workers Striving for Higher Response Rates in Undercounted Community
The Mixteco Indigena Community Organization Project’s radio station, Radio Indigena 94.1 FM has been releasing public service announcements in various languages including Spanish, Mixteco, and Zapoteco state wide about the 2020 census. These PSAs also include Facebook videos on their page with step by steps on how to fill it out. In the three languages, the announcers take the viewer through every question on the census and how to respond to them. The goal is to reach communities with indigenous people and migrant families who are farm workers, some of the hardest to count.
Oxnard, Calif., is a historically undercounted city that falls in Ventura County, the 59th hardest to count county in the nation, according to Stephanie Bertsch-Merbach, director of operations and strategic initiatives at the Ventura County Community Foundation. The foundation has been working for the past two years to prepare outreach efforts to connect with residents for the 2020 census.
Response rates in Oxnard aren’t high enough to have an accurate count. Parts of the city only have about a quarter of responses back, while other parts have about half. The VCCF, alongside with their committee members, partners, and community-based organizations, are scrambling to connect with people and reach those hard to count groups.
The MICOP community-based organization is doing outreach not only locally in Ventura County, but statewide as well. Their aim is to reach hard to count communities, particularly, farm worker communities. The team working on outreach focuses on educating these groups of people on what the census is and to guide them in the process of filling it out.
Two years ago, Vanessa Bechtel, president and CEO of VCCF, realized how much the census would impact Ventura County. It was an opportunity to bring people from all over the county to be a part of the Complete Count Committee and ensure higher response rates. Together they formed eight sub committees that focused on different aspects of the community.
“We started hosting meetings about two years ago, trying to include as many people as we could from different organizations, businesses, non profits, government, chambers, service organizations, to be a part of the complete count committee, trying to bring a lot of people and voices and opinions on the table as to how we can best outreach to the hardest to count communities,” said Bertsch-Merbach
One of the sub committees is the faith-based organizations that are continuing to hold weekly meetings via phone calls or zoom amid the coronavirus. Their focus is outreach to the local area churches and how to organize messaging with the churches so they can get information out.
Another one of the VCCF sub committees is the education and outreach that focuses on including outreach in the education system. The committee holds meetings to discuss how to incorporate outreach materials in schools and education centers. Another focus of theirs is trying to incorporate census materials into school curriculums, and they have partnered up with the Ventura County Office of Education.
The VCCF’s goal is to reach those who are hard to count in any way possible. A lot of the efforts are to refocus and reach people online or where they are at, like flyers in popular places people go. They want to create visibility, instead of doing in group meetings and gatherings, they are creating more of an online presence like, TV and radio ads. The refocus is to create online content that can be shared online, but more focus on radio ads. In Ventura county, radio is the strongest way to reach out to the hard to count community, according to Bertsch-Merbach.
“I couldn’t help but think about all those people that dreaded that question alongside of me,” said Isabel Leon as she sat at her dining room table with her phone ready to fill out the census. She hesitates reminiscing of a time when she dreaded the census due to talk about the citizenship question appearing on it. Since then, she has become a U.S. citizen and the citizen question didn’t appear on the 2020 census.
“I now see the importance of it, but I know there are many groups of people out there who still have a hard time understanding what it is or what it means, and I feel for them because I was them once,” said Leon.
The hardest to count communities are those that are still afraid of the census. The goal of the outreach being done is to reach out to be people who still have hesitation to fill out the census. Within that group could be farm workers, immigrants, non-English speakers, and multi-family households, as many may not be living in a legal dwelling, that is going to lead to an undercount. The outreach efforts to reach more people to fill out the census seem to be paying off, with some parts of Oxnard approaching the same response rates as 10 years ago.
