From Keystone Counts (https://www.keystonecounts.org/):
The Keystone Counts coalition is thrilled to announce that we have received a $1 million grant from the William Penn Foundation to support our “Get Out the Count” campaign. This generous grant is the largest census-related foundation award to date in the commonwealth, and it validates the work that our now-87 member coalition has been doing since 2017 to prepare for the 2020 Census. It also comes just weeks after Pennsylvania, unlike several other states, enacted a new fiscal year budget without any public funds for census work.
Foundation support like this ensures we can continue ahead with the field campaign we have planned to make sure residents stand up and be counted. In 2017, Keystone Counts started developing its “Get Out the Count” plan that will leverage the expertise of our coalition partners to employ a variety of civic engagement best practices including phone banking, door knocking, and text messaging. The coalition plans to contact up to 1.2 million households across 24 counties with significant populations of people who are at risk of not being counted, and these funds will be critical to supporting that work.
An accurate count is essential to ensuring that Pennsylvania receives all the Census-determined funds to which it is entitled. These funds go to support schools, health centers, public transportation and more. Pennsylvania currently receives $39 billion in such funds annually, so an undercount could cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars per year over the next ten years.
Making sure that every Pennsylvanian is counted in 2020 is also critical to making sure that all Pennsylvanians have access to political power. The Census will determine how new state and federal legislative districts will be drawn, and if the Census misses people –particularly from historically undercounted groups such as communities of color, rural populations, immigrants, and children—the new legislative maps could be drawn unfairly.
This summer, the Commonwealth failed to appropriate the $12 million, or $1 per Pennsylvanian, that we requested to support these efforts, but Keystone Counts remains committed to ensuring that every Pennsylvanian counts in 2020. Grants like this one will help enable us to continue this critically important work despite the lack of state support.
We appreciate the fact that the philanthropic community understands the importance of the Census to communities across Pennsylvania, and the fact that philanthropic organizations are stepping up and taking on a leadership role in this fight. It is time for elected officials to also step up and help ensure that everyone is counted, no one is left out, and Pennsylvania doesn’t fall behind, and we at Keystone Counts will continue to advocate on behalf of all Pennsylvanians.
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