JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Every ten years you may get a knock on the door – Census workers making sure you not only get counted in the country’s population but to be included in how much federal money your neighborhoods receive for schools, road projects and health care.
“It touches everything that we have in our community,” Sabeen Perwaiz said.
She’s the Executive Director of Florida Nonprofit Alliance, an advocacy group for the state’s nonprofit’s. She also works to help improve the state’s census count and educating people on the importance of filling out and turning in the Census.
“They think it’s a form that’s invading their privacy that will ask for their social security and it doesn’t do anything like that. It’s a very quick, you can do it online in five minutes or less, account of the demographics within a household,” she explained.
Perwaiz says this year, Jacksonville’s 63% response rate, is lower than what it was 2010. She says the coronavirus can be to blame, but also says there is the possibility of an undercount in the rural, black and immigrant populations because of some misconceptions about what the census is not.
“For rural, access to the internet is not readily available. They may not get the census employees showing up on the regular basis based on accessibility. A lot of the immigrant population might not be familiar with the census because it’s not administered from the different countries they are coming from,” Perwaiz told First Coast News.
Census workers have been out in First Coast communities starting this week getting people to fill out the forms.
The deadline to fill out the Census is September 30th. For more information on completing it, click here.