After my first submission to The Temple News where I highlighted the need to make community development more inclusive, I began my on-boarding process with the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Census Bureau as a regional technician and decennial field quality monitoring data-analyst where I was tasked with monitoring enumerator fraud.
The civic responsibility I once reserved for the Yorktown and Ludlow neighborhoods of Philadelphia grew to encompass Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Washington D.C., Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee.
Census data are used, among other purposes, to apportion the seats of the U.S. House of Representatives, redraw congressional districts in each state, and allocate billions of dollars each year in federal financial assistance.
132 federally-funded programs utilized Census Bureau data to allot over $675 billion during the 2015 fiscal year, according to the September 2017 report published by the U.S. Census Bureau.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development had several projects funded like its Section Eight Housing Choice Vouchers, Section Eight Housing Assistance Payments, Community Development Block Grants, Emergency Shelter Grants, Supportive Housing for the Elderly and Supportive Housing for Persons with Disabilities programs.
The 2020 decennial census will shape our cities and states for years to come as will harmful census disinformation which poses a…
