Op-Ed: Philanthropy’s Success with Census Needs to Continue
This article was originally published as “Philanthropy’s Success with Census Needs to Continue,” by Gary Bass and Angela Cheng in the Center for Effective Philanthropy blog in July 2021.
Excerpt
When funders gathered in 2015 to talk about ways to promote a fair and accurate 2020 census, none of us could have imagined perhaps the most fraught decennial census cycle in American history. For six years, a small group of funders working together nationally as the Democracy Funders Collaborative Census Subgroup managed a pooled fund and sought to align funding with other foundations.
The philanthropic community successfully designed and implemented – with numerous nonprofit partners – an unprecedented campaign to ensure that people of color, low-income populations and other historically undercounted communities were properly counted. We won’t know complete results until the Census Bureau releases detailed data over the next year, yet it’s clear that if hundreds of foundations across the country had not joined together in this campaign, census participation would have been far lower.
We’re proud of our accomplishments and realize the importance of continuing this work. We’re glad to share lessons from this collaboration as well as how we plan to carry these lessons forward in planning for the 2030 Census.
