Follow up to Sunday’s Anti-Racism conversation about the census
Following up on Sunday's Census discussion, below is the e-mail that One Person One Vote Coalition is sending out to encourage volunteers for census outreach. It’s a rather lengthy e-mail but the salient points are that there will be late afternoon/evening times when volunteers will be reaching out via phone to people. The phone roster is targeted to the hard to reach Capital Region neighborhoods that are showing a very low census response rate. My understanding is that this is an outreach effort (and not a time when volunteers are helping people to actually fill out the census.)
As you can see, there are three dates and times when the phone banking will occur. We need 30 volunteers for each of these sessions.
Note that each phone banking session has its own link, so if people want to volunteer they have to sign up for that particular session. Also note that the first session is this Tuesday:
As you know, NAACP is part of the Coalition. On its behalf, Deborah Brown-Johnson has agreed to be one of the hosting organizations for this outreach initiative, which mainly means getting the word out through the NAACP network (not sure if that means FB or other means of communication.)
Here’s the e-mail from Regina Tillman, who is leading the effort:
From: Regina Tillman <rmt370@gmail.com> Sent: Saturday, July 25, 2020 12:40 AM
Get Out The Count (GOTC) is a collective effort by individuals, institutions and organizations to encourage completion of the 2020 Census for a Fair and Accurate count in NYS. Many local organizations (including the Capital Area Council of Churches, NAACP Albany, Capital Area Urban League, Team Esteem on the Hill, Team H.E.R.O., Centro Civico, Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, Unity House, LWV Albany County, and more...) have been participating as partners in a local 2020 Census Campaign with the “One Person One Vote” Coalition for the past several months. The Coalition has already taken several important steps to conduct outreach in the Capital Region… door to door flyers, a virtual call center serving as a Census and Corvid-19 Helpline, and bus stop shelter posters. An important strategy remains to be started… PHONE BANKING!And for that, we need all of you!
We are calling upon all of our members, partner organizations, friends and associates to join us on each of the upcoming dates set up for Virtual Phone Banking and Text Banking! This is a great opportunity to get involved in the all-important 2020 Census that allows our communities to be seen so that we can get our share of federal funding and representation! And, you can just sit at home to participate!
Justice takes many shapes and forms. And when we are undercounted, our communities get underfunded and underserved.Today, we are not even reaching our census response rates of 2010… and this is not good at all for helping us to get what our community needs for education, healthcare, housing, and the rest. No COUNT today means for all of the next ten years, we will be unseen!
So… please do JOIN US in Phone and Text Banking to the community! Never did phone or text banking before? It is easy and it will only take a few minutes for you to be trained to take calls with a written script provided. All you need is a laptop/desktop or android tablet. The calls will be coming to you!
All times are in the early evenings and we will need to fill 30 seats inside of our virtual meeting room to cover the thousands of phone numbers that need to be made to our neighbors across the Capital Region! Pick from the following dates, click on the link and enter your information. Then, place the dates and times on your calendar so you won’t miss it!
Come and be a part of the 2020Census Phone Banks hosted by our One Person, One Vote Coalition! Questions?Contact April Land, Interim Executive Director, Capital Area Urban League at landapril@gmail.com , or Regina Tillman, 3rd Vice President, League of Women Voters NYS at rmt371@live.com .
Let’s make sure the Capital Region COUNTS! Thank you!
