Brooklyn Community Foundation Announces $100,000 to Promote a Fair and Accurate Census 2020
Brooklyn Community Foundation announces a $100,000 commitment to local and statewide organizing efforts to prepare communities for the 2020 Census. Grants to the Center for Law and Social Justice at Medgar Evers College and the New York Immigration Coalition aim to ensure that historically undercounted populations in the borough are accurately counted and that the $600 billion in federal funding allocated using information from the 2020 Census count is distributed fairly.
According the City University of New York (CUNY) Mapping Service, more than 80% of Brooklyn’s population lives in areas identified as “hard to count.”
A $40,000 grant to the Center for Law and Social Justice will support the NYC Black Leadership Action Coalition for Census 2020 (NYC BLAC) in strategy development and outreach planning to historically “hard to count” black communities and communities of African descent to increase fair access to resources and political power.
The New York Immigration Coalition will also receive $40,000 to support the New York Counts 2020 statewide coalition tocoordinate a broad-based “get out the count” campaign aimed at increasing response rates, while also advocating against changes to the Census that could suppress survey responses—including the inclusion of a Citizenship question for the first time in 70 years.
Brooklyn Community Foundation will allocate an additional $20,000 this year through a collaborative effort with other foundations funding Census 2020 organizing across New York State, to bring greater attention to challenges facing Brooklyn’s communities and ensure that national and statewide strategies enhance local efforts...