From visualizing data to taking action: How we’re investing in the 2020 Census count for communities of color

Over the summer, I told you about the launch of the Tableau Foundation’s Racial Justice Data Initiative. Through this three-year, $10 million strategy, we intend to get to the core of the issue and form partnerships to advance the use of data to undo systemic racism and oppression in the U.S.

We know this work will take time. Dismantling structures and biases that have existed in this country for centuries will not happen overnight, and we are committed to supporting the effort for the long haul.

But we’re also committed to getting started right away. 

When we launched the Racial Justice Data Initiative, one of the first questions we asked ourselves was if there was anything urgent we could take action against. In 2020, of course, that answer could take many forms, but what came to the surface was the Census.

On the scale of critical issues rising to the surface this year, the Census may not seem that splashy. But this once-every-10-years count is absolutely critical for communities. The Census count determines how much federal funding flows into a community for educational programs like Headstart and critical resources like hospitals. Decisions about transit projects and Medicaid funding depend on an accurate Census count, as do the number of Congressional representatives a community is allocated. All of this matters for equity. Communities need accurate funding to serve residents and representatives who will advocate for them at the federal level.

We know from historical data that communities of color are often undercounted in the Census. This year, COVID-19 has complicated outreach and response rates even more. But at the same time, the pandemic has shown how critical it is for communities to have the resources they need. 

Right now, there are so many organizations on the ground in communities pushing up against the Census deadline in October to ensure that counts are as accurate as possible. We wanted to do our part to help advocates see where people are most at risk for being undercounted so they could target their efforts as time and resources get crunched. And we also wanted to take action directly to support their work.

The initiative we’ve undertaken at Tableau Foundation around the Census over the last few months is—we hope—making a difference in communities. For me, it’s also serving as a proof of concept for how we plan to carry out our racial equity work. We’re confident in what we can bring to this effort: data visualization capability, unrestricted and flexible funding, and technical support. And we know that in order to make the best use of our resources, we need strong partnerships in place, and to invest the time and energy in really listening to organizations and people with connections to the communities that we aim to serve. 

This is a multi-step process, but every conversation we had with our partner organizations around how to best support Census response efforts educated us more, and enabled us to make investments that we believe will truly make a difference.

Data was the jumping-off point. As soon as we decided to invest in improving Census representation, we contacted our partner organization Headwaters Economics. Headwaters is a longstanding partner of ours, and an expert working with data to highlight the needs of vulnerable communities. They created a series of four visualizations showing Census response rates for four communities: Black, Latinx, Asian, and American Indian/Native American. In the visualizations, you can see where the responses are lowest in proportion to the number of people living in a community, and consequently which communities are most at risk for an undercount. Our hope was to make these visualizations as actionable as possible for the organizations working on outreach efforts. 

Though the visualizations are meant to be a tool for nonprofits, we decided that we wanted to eat our own dog food—so to speak—and use them to inform our financial investments in this effort. We had $50,000 allocated to improve Census rates for each of the four groups, so we looked to the vizzes to see where the risks of undercounting were highest.

Even though at Tableau Foundation we are—of course—big believers in the power of data, we know it’s not the whole story. So we reached out to four organizations that work directly with the communities represented in the vizzes to gut-check the findings from the data, and to seek advice on where we should direct our funding. 

From Hispanics in Philanthropy, we learned that what the data from Headwaters showed was correct: In Hidalgo County, Texas, only 50% of households had responded to the Census. They were able to add our contribution to the grant funding they were already compiling to support community-based organizations in the region working on Census outreach. 

When we connected with Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy (AAPIP), they connected us to OCA Greater Houston, who will use the funding to reach hard-to-count people among the county’s Asian population. Before seeing the data visualized, I was not aware that the Houston suburbs were home to such a large Asian community, and we would not have known to direct our outreach there if it weren’t for the vizzes. When I talked to OCA at 7 pm, they were in the midst of packing bags with information packets on COVID-19, voting, and the Census that they were going to hang on people’s doors. It was so clear to me that they are committed people who care a lot about the future of their community.

Native Americans in Philanthropy connected us with Nava Education Project, a group focused on providing voter education to Native American tribes. Ahtza Dawn Chavez, Nava’s CEO, made it clear to me what’s at stake for Native communities if they’re undercounted in the Census: “For every person that is undercounted, we lose out on $5,000 per year—so over a 10-year span, that's $50,000 per person of just money left on the table,” she says. “And when you think about political representation, that means that we also lose representatives for our community when we're already struggling to have a voice and a seat at the table when it comes to policy issues and political agendas. When you reduce our numbers, it makes it much easier to discard us.” Chavez confirmed that the at-risk counties in the Headwaters dashboards were accurate; they are directing the funding toward their outreach efforts in the heart of the Navajo Nation, which have already been effective in improving Census counts in communities.

The Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta directed us to FairCount, a Georgia-based nonprofit focused on improving Census representation in the Black community. We saw from the Headwaters visualization that Fulton County, Georgia was very at risk for being undercounted. But when I talked to Rebecca DeHart, FairCount’s CEO, she told me that while that was true, Fulton County actually has a fairly good Census outreach infrastructure, and they were much more focused on efforts in the part of the state south of Atlanta, where there’s a large rural population and almost no outreach system in place. What they want to do with the funding is bolster their efforts to reach hard-to-access people through making connections with local food banks, doing direct advertising through radio placements, and developing a patch-through call system that would connect people who answer directly to the Census’s phone-response system. 

For issues like voter registration and Census response, hyperlocal organizations are the ones who make change happen. As a funder up in Seattle, buffered from many of the challenges they face, I am the first to admit that I am not an expert in where to direct funds, or what levers to pull. That’s why we committed to this multi-step process of contacting an umbrella group with connections to the community who could direct our funding to the greatest effect. Without our conversation with Native Americans in Philanthropy, for instance, we would not have known about Nava. Unless the Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta had directed us to FairCount, we would not have known what circumstances they were navigating on the ground and where our funding could be put to the best work. 

And none of our funding would be as effective as it could be if we had predetermined the interventions we wanted to fund without talking to people on the ground about what works. Providing unrestricted funding allows these deep-rooted community organizations to do what’s best and change tactics as conditions on the ground change. As funders, we try to show up with humility and an understanding that we are not the experts. Especially in this type of work, we’ve learned that it works best if we make unrestricted grants so the hyperlocal organizations—who are the experts—can direct how they use them. Foundations like ours can’t have a rolodex of every hyperlocal nonprofit they could fund to address equity issues at the local level. But we can hold ourselves to a standard of doing the work to get our funds where they can have the greatest impact. If that means layers of phone conversations—that’s great. The learning process was worth it, and I am incredibly grateful for everyone that took the time to talk with me.