Center helps nonprofits tap power of census data

A digital counter on the UCLA Asian American Studies Center website meticulously clicks off the days, hours, minutes and seconds until April 1, when Census Day arrives in full glory to begin the official count of everyone residing in the United States.

 

It’s a red-letter day that Melany Dela Cruz-Viesca, assistant director of the Asian American Studies Center (AASC), has been waiting for. In her role as census coordinator at the center, she realizes all too well what’s at stake. Every year, the federal government allocates more than $400 billion to states and communities, based in part on census data. Another way to put it: Every person counted results in the provision of $1,000 in federal funds for education, housing, healthcare, transportation and other local needs.

 

And Dela Cruz-Viesca wants to make sure that communities that are the most disenfranchised get their fair share of resources.

 

Designated by the U.S. Bureau of the Census as one of 57 Census Information Centers across the country, AASC helps nonprofits and community leaders across the nation tap into the power of this massive database to validate the needs of underserved communities.

 

“What makes us unique as a Census Information Center is that we’re here to empower underserved communities to understand and use census data,” said Dela Cruz-Viesca, who not only crunches the numbers for nonprofits, but does numerous presentations on the importance of the census at conventions and workshops attended by nonprofits.

 

For the Center for Nonprofit Management, a support organization for nonprofits in Southern California, Dela Cruz-Viesca regularly co-leads a three-hour, hands-on computer training lab where grant writers and managers from nonprofit groups in the arts, youth services and foundations learn how to use census data — how to find it, download it, analyze it and put it into a spreadsheet for funding groups to see.

 

“If you don’t know how to navigate the census websites, it can be pretty overwhelming,” she acknowledged. “So when people leave one of these training sessions, they’re much more confident about interpreting the data. And they’re so appreciative of the information we give them. They’re like, ‘Wow! This has opened up a whole new world for me.’”

 

Dela Cruz-Viesca and the staff at AASC also mine this massive database to provide nonprofits with clear statistical descriptions of a community or ethnic group. Income and educational levels, population growth or decline, English language proficiency, home ownership, employment status and more can all be accurately portrayed from census data.

 

As a Census Information Center, the AASC works with the National Coalition of Asian Pacific American Community Development and its more than 100 national, regional and local nonprofit organizations to use census data to improve their programs and services to communities. To clarify the need for services to Asian Americans, for example, AASC partnered with the coalition and several others to produce “The New Face of Asian Pacific America,” based on 2000 Census. This collection of statistical “snapshots” showed that, contrary to the stereotype of the Model Minority, many Asian Americans remain impoverished, jobless and less educated than the average American.

 

“Our reports have been used to help legitimize an initiative to disaggregate Asian American data,” said Dela Cruz-Viesca, who has been working with the U.S. Census Bureau for the past nine years to depict the status of Asian Americans more accurately. “Too often, Asian Americans are reported as being well off with high median household incomes and high educational attainment rates. But when you break down the data to look specifically at Pacific Islanders, Vietnamese, Hmong and Cambodian, for example, a different picture emerges. We want policymakers to take that into consideration when they make decisions around funding.”

 

Based on a report to which the AASC staff and faculty (part of an effort by the UC Asian American and Pacific Islander Multi-Campus Research Program) contributed on the health profile of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders living in California, Assemblymember Mike Eng, D-Monterey Park, introduced a bill Feb. 19 that will require state agencies, boards and commissions to collect data that reflect the full spectrum of these racial groups in California.  

 

Census data are also being used by the coalition to make sure the federal government and its agencies provide language support for large groups of recent immigrants who have limited English proficiency. Language limitations makes it difficult for them to access critical services such as police protection, health care and job assistance.

 

UCLA students, a group that was undercounted in the 2000 census and is classified as a hard-to-count population by the Census Bureau, also are in need of census training, Dela Cruz-Viesca said. So the AASC recently held a workshop for students on campus to stress the importance of being counted.

 

“The census is the most extensive dataset that is collected at the federal level,” said Dela Cruz-Viesca, who received her master’s degree in urban planning from UCLA. “Even county data sometimes doesn’t have as much information. That’s because the Census Bureau has the infrastructure to do these kinds of massive data collections.”

 

That data collection hasn’t always been done without controversy. At the beginning of World War II, for example, the Census Bureau helped identify geographic areas of the country with large concentrations of Japanese Americans, a move that paved the way for their internment. While the bureau later apologized for its role, Dela Cruz-Viesca said, “There were also concerns that the bureau might have helped identify Arab-American communities after 9-11.”

 

Census officials raised a few hackles last year when they announced that a Negro category would be added to the census form, which already has an African-American category. That’s because roughly 500,000 people in the 2000 Census preferred to categorize themselves as “Negro” and wrote it in, Dela Cruz-Viesca explained. After the 2010 census, the bureau will decide whether to keep that category.

 

But controversy aside, said Dela Cruz-Viesca, “What’s really important in the end is that we need to stand up and be counted. There are just too many resources that are lost if we don’t.”