For eight months, Fanny Villarreal has been talking about counting.

As the executive director of the YWCA in Syracuse, she’s spent her time fielding questions from community members about participating in the 2020 census.

Villarreal receives many of the same questions from immigrants, refugees and other members of the underserved communities she works with. The most common questions concern the confidentiality of census information, particularly with regard to citizenship, she said.

When the census count officially begins March 13, every U.S. household will receive a flyer in the mail explaining how to complete the form online. Villarreal meets with people from across the city to explain that noncitizens count in the census, but their information won’t be shared with any other organizations or law enforcement.

“For once, we are teaching everybody of its importance and that we all count,” Villarreal said.

Census numbers help determine how much funding Syracuse receives for a number of federal programs, including Pell grants, Medicare and food assistance programs.

The confusion surrounding the census in Syracuse puts the city at a high risk of an undercount, where census counts are lower than the actual population. Several census tracts in Syracuse are at risk of undercount, according to a map from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Almost 10% of personal income in New York state comes from federal programs that the census count determines, according to a study from George Washington University. New York state received more than $73 billion in census-connected funds in 2016.

New York is expected this census cycle to lose at least one representative in the U.S. House of Representatives, which allocates seats based on census population, said Tory Russo, the census coordinator for Syracuse.

A large undercount in New York could result in another seat loss, diluting New Yorkers’ voting power, she said.

The Syracuse Department of Neighborhood and Business Development hired Russo to start promoting census participation last July. She has since worked with at least 50 local organizations to educate community members about the count.

YWCA is one of those community organizations. The organization is recruiting ambassadors to knock on doors to spread the word and combat misconceptions about the census.

Some of those misconceptions are particularly present this cycle, Villarreal said. The Trump administration in 2017 and 2018 pushed to add a question about citizenship status to the 2020 census. The Supreme Court unanimously shot down the question.

The prospect of a citizenship question has increased distrust in the census process among Syracuse’s immigrant and refugee communities, said Michael Collins, executive director of the Northeast Community Center, in an email. His center has worked to inform people that it’s both safe and important to participate in the census.

Language can act as another barrier to census participation, said Stephanie Horton-Centore, a program facilitator at Bob’s School, a Refugee Assistance Program. Adult language students at Bob’s School, located in Syracuse’s Northside, will work with interpreters to fill out the census, Horton-Centore said.

The census is available online in 13 languages, including for the first time Arabic, French, Haitian Creole, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese and Tagalog.

“We want our folks to be counted,” Horton-Centore said. “People don’t realize the importance of it, the implications of it.”

Russo, a graduate of Syracuse University, said she wants SU students to know that they are also part of the Syracuse census count. Those living on campus will be counted by the university, she said, but students living off campus should fill out the census online.

Growing up, Russo’s two siblings received reduced-price lunch, a program her family needed in order to eat at school. Her dad relied on unemployment insurance after he was laid off. Both of these programs receive funding from the census, according to census data.

“It is so important to how our democracy is supposed to function, that there is fair and equal representations for communities,” Russo said. “There’s a lot of ways that that doesn’t happen.”

Published on March 1, 2020 at 11:22 pm

Contact Patrick: pjlineha@syr.edu