FUNDING COMMUNITY-BASED OUTREACH (CBO) TO SUPPORT CENSUS 2020 IN OREGON

During the 2010 Census, nearly one in five (20.2) Oregon households did not initially mail back their census questionnaire. This population, considered “hard-to-count” (HTC), requires targeted community-based outreach (CBO) efforts to ensure everyone is counted in the census.

Image by Myredcoug from Pixabay

State and local governments, as well as philanthropic organizations, share a responsibility to secure funding that supports CBO efforts that will fairly and accurately count all Oregonians, including individuals in HTC communities. In April 2019, I co-authored a study with my colleague, Nick Chun, at the Population Research Center at Portland State University (PSU). We found that funding CBO efforts for Census 2020 in Oregon could require raising at least $7 to $8.4 million. The report calculates a funding target by largely following an approach outlined by the Fiscal Policy Institute.

To learn more about the methodology and assumptions used to calculate these figures, read the Population Research Center’s full report here.

New release as of June 7, 2019: The 2020 HTC Projections for Oregon counties are available here.