In this two part series, I’m talking with Stephanie Reid, Executive Director Philly Counts 2020 and Melissa Bird, Executive Director, District Census 2020 about their work around the 2020 census. While the census is a once-a-decade project, the lessons learned can have a profound impact on ongoing efforts in any local government to more effectively deploy inclusive and empathic engagement strategies. The key to 2030 will be to start early - keep existing partnerships active through other engagement work - and to leverage community resources like the ones found on Govlaunch so we can learn from one another and ultimately build better, more responsive and resilient communities.
As cities with deep digital divides, populations of people that have been historically undercounted and forgotten, and at a time with heightened distrust in government, Philly and DC were able to overcome the odds to boost census participation through some creative, human-centered strategies. We dive into strategies pre-pandemic and their pivot post-lockdown and how lessons learned from their census work is driving future city wide engagement strategies.
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Featured government: Washington, D.C. & Philadelphia, PA
Episode guests:
Stephanie Reid, Executive Director Philly Counts 2020
Melissa Bird, Executive Director, District Census 2020
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Lindsay: (00:05)
Welcome to the Govlaunch podcast. Govlaunch is the Wiki for local government innovation and on this podcast, we're sharing the stories of local government innovators and their efforts to build smarter governments. I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano, co-founder of Govlaunch and your host.
Recently I sat down with Stephanie Reid from Philadelphia and Melissa Bird from DC to dig into their 2020 census work. The conversation was so fascinating that I'll share it over the next two episodes. This week, we'll talk about strategies pre pandemic and their pivot post-lockdown. Now many cities across the US have deep digital divides and populations of people that have been historically undercounted and forgotten. This is no different in DC or Philly. This is also a time with heightened distrust in government. Philly and DC share their inspiring work in these next two episodes in an effort to show what is possible when we rethink trust-building with the community for US census engagement and beyond. So let's hear more from Stephanie and Melissa.
Lindsay: (01:10)
Thank you both for joining me today. To start, can you each introduce yourselves and share a bit about your role? Stephanie, I'll start with you.
Stephanie: (01:18)
Yep. Hi, my name is Stephanie Reid. I'm the Executive Director of Philly Counts for the City of Philadelphia. And the office was originally created to do engagement around the 2020 census. But as we have developed a pretty massive wide reaching network, we have decided to pivot that to do work on additional things and right now focusing on education and additional community work around vaccinations.
Melissa: (01:45)
Hi, I'm Melissa Bird. I'm currently the acting associate director for neighborhood planning and the DC office of planning. Prior to that, I was the executive director of DC counts 2020, which was an office created just to lead around engagement and coordination of efforts across agencies and all of our community partners for the census.
Lindsay: (02:04)
And both of your cities share some commonalities around demographics and the digital divide. So limited to no access to the internet. We should begin by giving an intro for our listeners. Can you give us a brief backstory of your cities and the struggles you face with engagement efforts more generally? Stephanie, I'll start with you again.
Stephanie: (02:23)
Yeah. I think Philadelphia has a pretty long history of both civic engagement and engagement around community programs. We have a massive block captain program that's been around for decades. So as a culture in the city engagement is really important. One of the things that we found as we went through our work on this census, however, is that it tends to happen in very siloed ways. And the truth is that people at the neighborhood level, they see us all as the city. They don't care if it's my initiative or someone else's initiative. And the census was an opportunity where we really brought many different city departments and all of our local community-based organizations to the table to have a comprehensive engagement program. And I think that was really important. The other thing that I think is a pretty significant challenge in Philadelphia is the digital divide. We have a pretty deep digital divide here.
Melissa: (03:16)
So going into the census in DC, we were aware of some very specific challenges that we needed to face head on. Our digital divide is huge. We already knew that 22% of DC households do not have personal internet access. So that was one of our first barriers that we needed to address. We are a very diverse city. Uh, we're about split evenly almost between African-Americans and white residents. And we also have a growing immigrant population, primarily Latinos. So we needed to sort of overcome some of the language barriers that we were facing. We also know that 40% of our census tracts were already identified by the US census as hard to count. And so that was a lot of information for us to think about before we even started, we do have really active and engaged residents across the city.
Melissa: (04:03)
Um, you know, some areas more so than others and DC is really unique also in that we don't have any voting representation in Congress. And sometimes that can be a challenge for us to get people to have a stake in some of these kind of federally based initiatives and that trust in the government. So we always have to think about sort of that whole big picture of how our city is perceived and how people perceive their role in our city.
Lindsay: (04:26)
So I want to first talk about pre COVID. Feedback from both of you has been in this process of network building engagement and raising awareness needs to begin much sooner. And there's an argument for this even being an ongoing effort, which we'll get into, but can each of you talk about your strategy back in 2018, 2019, when you were planning for this and how you started your outreach efforts?
Stephanie: (04:50)
We had such a fun plan in 2018 and 2019. When I think back, I feel very sad that we didn't have an opportunity to execute it. Uh, we started by launching a census champion training program and the idea behind that was that we were going to train a massive network of people all over the city, that we would be able to activate when we got to census day and we did get to launch that. And that went incredibly well. We trained over 8,000 people in eight different languages and ASL. And the idea was that then we would use that network of people to have lots of local events all over the city. We would work with community-based organizations who would open up computer labs. We had worked with all the libraries to have computer labs open, and then we would use all of these local people to push people to fund block party like events with pretzels and water ice, all things Philly, and make the census a fun civic activity for people to take a lot of pride in around their, their communities. And unfortunately, as we know, which we'll talk more about, um, all of that fun togetherness kind of got shut down by COVID.
Lindsay: (06:11)
Right. Melissa how about you all in DC?
Melissa: (06:15)
So I started in this position in October, 2018, and this was the first time we had a dedicated office starting early to just focus on census engagement. And much like Stephanie, we had so many big ideas, so many partners we brought in, but I think first and foremost, we had two things we wanted to focus on: meeting people where they are, where are they already going to be? Where can we share information in a way that's easy, uh, low barriers to get that information. And then also building up a network of trusted messengers and just recognizing that for a lot of us in the government, we're not the trusted messengers in communities. So how can we find those voices, those representatives in communities at the real block micro level. Um, and that's when we launched our census ambassadorship program. And that was a training that we provided to over 1000 residents across all kinds of professions, neighborhoods, backgrounds, for people to just be that voice both big and small, whether it's holding an event or posting on social media or just talking about it with other families and your neighbors. Everything really launched with our complete count committee in May of 2019. And like Stephanie, we had a lot of events planned, but definitely as we would later find out, laying the groundwork early on was really, really critical to being able to pivot so quickly. But we also wanted to focus on also how to identify partners we don't normally think of when we think of community engagement. My background is in planning. We do a lot of meetings in communities, but what are some non-traditional ways that we can reach people and who are partners that we don't normally think of for reaching people? So that was a big part of our thought process through 2019.
Lindsay: (07:59)
So the census cycle was obviously unique in that midway through, we all went into lockdown. So can you walk through what the process was to really pivot in response to the pandemic and some of the limitations that you all experienced, especially considering your digital divides.
Stephanie: (08:17)
It was really hard. I think the thing that we had really grounded our plan in was the idea of individual one-on-one conversations with people, knowing that we needed to be able to connect with people, to help them think through why it would make sense for them to participate in the census. It had been politicized in a way that had never happened before to our knowledge. And we really felt like, um, allowing people to talk this out was going to be important in moving people to participate. So when everything shut down, uh, we very quickly pivoted into phone banking and that was not ever part of our plan. It was not something we originally planned to do, but fortunately, we have a system that allowed us to do that. And we started making phone calls pretty immediately. And originally our phone calls were a hundred percent focused on, have you completed the census? And my team and I were helping make calls and pretty quickly realized that that script was incredibly out of touch. People were adjusting to stay at home orders. Many people had lost their jobs. There was a lot of panic and the anxiety that people were experiencing. So calling and saying, "Hey, I'm with the city, have you done your census?" was just not falling well. Right. So we very quickly changed our script so that we used a more trauma informed approach. And the first thing that we would do when we call people is just checked in with them on a couple of basic COVID related needs. And they would change as time went on. So at first we were asking about access to food, and if people needed help, we would help them find the closest place to get meals.
Stephanie: (10:06)
Over time we would ask if people needed information about filing for unemployment. We shared information about rental assistance, all these things. And after answering a couple of those questions and helping people, then we would talk to them about the census and we could connect it back to how federal funding is based on census data, and that we're going to need that funding as we're recovering from COVID. So that was part of what we did. I think there was also a number of other things that were really important.
Stephanie: (10:35)
We did do door to door, to door canvassing, but we didn't knock on doors. We used door hangers, and then we would talk to people along the way. We carried masks and hand sanitizer. And then, um, we also in the middle of all of this incorporated, uh, COVID community response captain training, that was based on the way that we created our census champion training. And it was interesting because many of those people who were trained to be community response captains ended up pivoting back into our census work. So it was like another way that we built the broader network of people that we were working with.
Melissa: (11:15)
So we, from when we got the word that everything was going into lockdown, the first immediate thing we had to do was start canceling events, because there was a lot of confusion about what would happen, what wouldn't happen. We had planned to visit all 49 free senior lunch sites in the district for the first two weeks the census was going to be happening. We called it our census lunchtime tour. We'd already reserved about 40 hours of our mobile tech lab, which is a bus that has 10 computer stations in it to be at all kinds of public events. So, first and foremost, we just went into sort of crisis mode of canceling things. Then we wanted to message to all of our partners immediately, that the most important thing right now is that you stay home, you stay safe, if you are providing essential services in the city, practice good social distancing.
Melissa: (12:05)
So we wanted to make sure that message sort of rose to the top. Then we took some time to just think about all of the resources we have at hand. If we can't do our block parties, we can't take our tech into the neighborhoods. We had 50 tablets, we had purchased just to go out and have these kinds of one-on-one events. And it's true that that conversation and talking to people is really what changes their mind about participation. But we thought about all the resources we had and the groundwork we had been laying for the previous 15 months, essentially. So immediately looked to all of our locations of essential services with a very active DC food policy council who were able to start mapping out all the essential services, posting them every day. And we started getting census material distributed at all of those across the city every day. Um, we also started doing in-home meal delivery to seniors and persons with disabilities, and we were able to get 8,000 cards about the census into meals delivered in the course of two weeks. Um, and then we relied really heavily on our grant grantees. We have 16 grant organizations that we were working with and our partners to start their own phone banking, texting robocalls, social media alerts to try to reach folks that way. And so that was a way to really dive deep into some of these really historically under counted populations. We already had a door hanging process in place.
Melissa: (13:29)
So prior to COVID shutting us down, we had already distributed about 31,000 door hangers in some of our hardest to count census tracts. And we also had done a CVS bag insert about the census in 75,000 bags for the months leading up to census. So we had those visuals and then we also still had an ongoing multimedia campaign. So that didn't change. We still had radio, TV, um, and bus ads. Um, unfortunately we put a lot of effort into Metro stations and then nobody was taking Metro anymore. So I think the lesson here is you have to cover everything. So you just have to think about all the different places that could be a touch point. Um, and then we relied on our partners to really start ramping up their online events instead in replacement of, you know, block parties and that kind of thing.
Lindsay: (14:22)
Well, great segue because I want to talk specifically about some of the partnerships that you all developed. Both DC and Philly have relied on some really amazing partner networks to get the message out. Can you talk more about some of those partnerships and how they were structured?
Melissa: (14:36)
So one of the first things that we did this, the first time we've done this in DC for the census is we launched a grant specific program just around the census and through a competitive process, we were able to award over $900,000 to 16 CBOs in DC to focus on really historically under counted communities at a very deep level. And the idea was that this funding would be used for them to develop messaging that was culturally relevant and ways to engage that maybe we hadn't thought of down to the block level. And this was really important because we also needed to reach our Ethiopian community. DC has the largest Ethiopian and Amharic speaking population in the country. And the census survey is not in Amharic. So we wanted to make sure that we were working with organizations that could really reach that population.
Melissa: (15:26)
That was a huge success for us, um, because we really needed to rely on them even more so during COVID. Also another great partnership we had was with our faith-based community. We did a census Sabbath in 2019, where we could identify those organizations that were really excited about census. We relied very heavily on them. And then I think one of our best partnerships was with healthcare providers. We had a really active partnership with children's national health network and also with Mary center, which is a community-based clinic because we found that through focus group information, healthcare providers are one of the most trusted resources of messaging.
Melissa: (16:04)
And so we wanted to train those folks as census ambassadors to deliver messaging while seeing clients and patients. And they were great partners because healthcare providers rely really heavily on accurate data, whether it's staffing decisions, number of beds, locations, expansions, closures, openings, whatever community clinics, they really need that data. So they were very willing to work with us. And we created a bib that says, I count two in English and Spanish, and we distributed over 8,000 of those through these partnerships, with these clinics, all of our birthing hospitals, we wanted all newborn babies to go home with this bib. I count too. Um, it was great. People loved them. We also distributed them to daycare centers, early childhood education centers. So that was a really great partnership for us.
Lindsay: (16:55)
Great. And I know Stephanie, I was on your closing call after you wrapped up your work on the census. And it was really impressive. Just the number of attendees from a broad range of background that were on that call. So I'm excited to talk more about your partnerships over in Philadelphia.
Stephanie: (17:15)
Yeah. I think one of the things that worked really well for us was that we had such a vast range of partners from both city agencies to community-based organizations, and then including those people that are those leaders in the community that everyone knows, if you give them some information, somehow all of a sudden everybody has that. And we really tried to think strategically about how we created entry points and spaces for all of those people. And also how we supported the collaboration across all of those groups, which I think is one of the things that doesn't happen that often. And there is a pretty significant opportunity there. Like DC, we also had a fund, we worked with philanthropy network greater Philadelphia, and we raised $750,000 that went out to close to a hundred community-based organizations across the city. And we really focused on the communities that we know have been historically under counted and also looked for ways to bring in organizations that maybe had never received funding before, which was a pretty exciting part of it.
Stephanie: (18:23)
So for example, there was the Hispanic Cosmetologists Association. They had never received funding before, but they received funding and were a really important part of getting information out into the Hispanic community. So you could look at city agencies, we worked with the free library. They were incredible. And, um, would have provided a really great way for people to access the internet that they've been open, but, um, even still, they have a very broad reach and we're great. We worked with things like the school district, the school district did food distribution. So we were able to incorporate census information in there. We worked with our DHS, which was getting information out to families and children. But then we also looked at what are the community-based organizations that are touching a lot of these different groups. And for example, we worked with share food, which is an organization that distributes food across the city. And I think a lot of us found really creative ways to tap into the networks that were supporting people during this very difficult time. I think that some other partnerships that we had that were really important was elected officials. I think sometimes we forget how important those local elected officials are, but they already know their districts. They have connections, they have trust. And we found that partnering with the local elected officials for canvassing and for caravans was really effective. And then we worked with Penn nursing and they had their students volunteer with us to phone bank, but they also had a program where they were creating COVID support packets that had PPE and things that people need.
Stephanie: (20:04)
And then they were distributing it across the community. And they incorporated census information into that, and they put our branded masks in. And then we also worked with the mayor's commission on aging. They have a workforce program where they take aging adults and they put them in offices to develop work skills and they receive a small stipend. When everything closed down because of COVID, many of those participants could no longer go to their jobs and they were losing their stipends. So we partnered with them to pivot those members into our phone banking program, which meant that we could expand our reach, but also these seniors who were very much at risk and very vulnerable in this time were able to continue receiving their stipends. So we've really tried to think during this very difficult time of how we could create partnerships that were serving a greater purpose as well, and we're mutually beneficial.
Lindsay: (21:06)
And who better to help build trust in the community than those folks that you've really helped out in, in this time too. There's a lot of different strategies you all have mentioned. Do you have one or two that you found to be the most effective? I know some smaller cities without as many resources as say DC or Philly. The scattershot approach is a little intimidating. You mentioned Melissa, you just got to try everything, but do you have one or two you'd recommend people start with if they aren't at the same level that DC and Philly are at?
Melissa: (21:35)
Right. So I think first of all, look at the resources that are already available to you. I was incredibly impressed by everything that the US census put out material wise, they put together great. PSA's all kinds of print materials. You don't need to spend money, reinventing materials that are going to be provided to you. I would also say it's really important to work with other local governments, whether that's regionally or with your state, for us, we're part of the metropolitan Washington council of governments. And two months into this position, I was calling cog and saying, we need a regional working group, just focused on engagement. And that group proved to be incredible because we could share resources across Northern Virginia, Maryland, and DC. Um, and we did several things together, like, uh, take a break, take the census campaign for all employers one day for the census. And so find out what other local governments are doing.
Melissa: (22:32)
I think other things that were easy for us to do was we had all of our utility providers include census information in bills mailed out to people and also on their online pages. But again, you know, tap into everyone who's already got a touch point within the community, across district agencies. For us schools was a really important one as well. And all of our enrollment pivoted to just online enrollment, we added a census link to the online enrollment page because that's where 50,000 kids have to get registered. I also think the, for us, the healthcare, uh, tie-in was really, really beneficial for us. I think we got a lot out of that and I think we built a lot of trust in the community and we found a lot of new partners that we can work with in the future.
Stephanie: (23:16)
So we did a lot of tapping into city networks because those structures are already there. And I think that it's incredibly helpful if you have a mayor who is excited about the work and willing to, uh, advocate that this is a top priority. And I think that it's easy to forget how many of these outreach and communications networks already exist within your own family of government. So I think first fully exploring those. The other thing that we found was that we needed to make sure that everything we did was scalable. And I think this is just one of those things that if you take a little bit of time at the front, you, you can think about, okay, if more people want to participate in what I'm doing, how will I be able to make that possible? And an example of that is that we created tool kits all along the way, because we would find that everyone would want to meet with us and we would want to meet with them.
Stephanie: (24:13)
They would say, what do I do? What do you want from me? What can I do now? And having those conversations over and over is actually a it's a time suck. It takes up a lot of your capacity. And what we found is that if we took the time to create really neat tool kits, that would walk people through, here's what to do right now at this point, here's how to be supportive. Here's the suggest...suggested tactics and how to plug in the people would do it. So we had a general organizing toolkit that people could use to plan their activities across the course of the census. But then we would consistently release updated toolkits that would have social media kits. And, you know, here's what we're doing right now during this phase of the census. And we found that to be a really useful tool to expand our reach and our capacity.
Lindsay: (25:05)
That's great. Definitely the scalability piece is key. And we're actually working at Govlaunch on how to get more of these resources shared by cities like Philadelphia, you know, for other local governments to be able to access as well. Not just for census engagement, of course, but for a variety of different things, local governments are all reinventing the wheel. It's been really interesting to learn about your unique strategies to pivot your work in response to the pandemic.
Next week, I continue the conversation with Stephanie and Melissa about other factors impacting census engagement. We’ll talk network building and how more generally how to keep the engagement momentum alive even as we wrap up this cycle of the census.I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano and this podcast was produced by Govlaunch the Wiki for local government innovation. You can subscribe to hear more stories like this, wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a local government innovator, we hope you'll help us on our mission to build the largest free resource for local governments globally. You can join to search and contribute to the wiki at govlaunch.com. Thanks for tuning in. We hope to see you next time on the Govlaunch podcast.