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Cathryn McGill wanted to keep the momentum going. It was mid-March and her staff at New Mexico's Black Leadership Council already had held one successful event to get people in Albuquerque to fill out their 2020 census forms. Then the looming coronavirus pandemic hit, and social distancing meant that the rest of their plans had to be shelved.
They brainstormed, looking for a way to get the word out to people now quarantined on their couches. That's how Tiny Census Concerts (TCC) was born. The TCC series, shown on Facebook Live on Wednesdays through May 6, was inspired by NPR's very successful, very viral Tiny Desk Concerts.
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McGill, who also heads up the Complete Count Committee for Albuquerque and surrounding Bernalillo County, engaged talent such as singer Isaac Aragon, poet Ebony Isis Booth and singer Lara Manzanares as trusted messengers to spread the word about the census. About 40 of the states’ singers, dancers, musicians and spoken-word artists receive a $1,000 stipend for creating a video of their performance and promoting the event on their social media and within their networks.
Without the ability to bring people together for events, groups like the Complete Count Committee for Albuquerque have had to get creative about how they spread the word about the 2020 census. The U.S. Constitution requires the federal government to complete a full tally of the population once every 10 years. Because there are more than 300 million people in the United States, the Census Bureau asks community groups and other service organizations — including AARP — to help encourage residents to complete the questionnaires.
Although some states are already close to having 60 percent of their residents completing the census forms, New Mexico lags at around 40 percent, according to Dennis Johnson, a deputy regional director at the U.S. Census Bureau. A major hurdle for the sparsely populated state is that nearly 20 percent of its 2 million residents live in rural areas that don't have city-style addresses. And yet an update-and-leave effort, in which workers used GPS to update rural addresses and leave behind census materials, had to be abandoned because of the COVID-19 outbreak. For reasons like this, the Census Bureau has appealed to Congress for a 120-day extension to collect the country's data and deliver the results next spring, instead of at the end of this year.
As of April 23, Johnson says, the national count was “about where we expected it to be at this time, about 52 percent.” He is pleased given that, “with this national emergency, [the census is] not the number one priority on anyone's mind.”
The census determines the number of elected leaders each state has in the U.S. House of Representatives (one for every 30,000 people) as well as billions in federal funding for state and local programs. Because New Mexico ranks as the 50th poorest state — just ahead of Mississippi — it needs every dollar. (The list includes the District of Columbia.) Its affluent Los Alamos County leads the nation in census participation, with more than 72 percent self-responding so far, according to the Census Bureau.
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