News release from Mayor’s Office:
Mayor Ganim met with US Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross by conference call to request more resources and federal support be allocated to Bridgeport for marketing and grassroots field efforts in order gain resident participation in Census 2020.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Census 2020 operations were suspended and have caused the postponement of local Census Takers visiting households throughout the community to aid in the accurate count of the population in cities throughout the country. In addition to halted ground operations, Bridgeport officials learned that Census 2020 national advertising campaigns skipped messaging to the state’s largest populated city–Bridgeport, Connecticut. “We’re missing a huge part of our population in this process,” stated Mayor Ganim.
Mayor Ganim is requesting federal resources fill the need to effectively communicate about Census 2020 through media campaigns and public service announcements to ensure an accurate count. Mayor Ganim suspects the Latino community to be one of the most undercounted populations in the City of Bridgeport and had intentions to complement federal marketing funds with local resources to reach Latino and other undercounted communities in Bridgeport.
The current national self-response rate is 57.3%. Bridgeport is among the lowest throughout Connecticut, reporting just 43% response rate. The city plans to collaborate with state officials for support and to maximize communicating with residents of Connecticut to stress the importance of completing the Census 2020 survey.
Don’t you think that our 43% response has some reasons? It doesn’t cost anything to fill out the census, so what is the problem? Can some of it be illiteracy in ANY language?
In my own personal experience with canvasing Bridgeport residents a few years back, and also having worked at a public utility company, in customer service; I found that many many Latino’s were not literate in either English or Spanish and could only speak Spanish.
And Spanish, is no longer the only problem. Most of my current neighbors are from the Middle East, Pakistan and a number of Eastern European nations and do not speak or read English. So what do we do? Send out census papers in 15 different languages?