 Good afternoon everyone and thank you for having us today. My name is Katie DeCourt. I am a Youth Services Librarian with the Sacramento Public Library. And I'm Eric Berman. I'm the Teen Services Coordinator for the Alameda County Library. And our presentation today is Census and Sensibility Preparing California Libraries for the 2020 Census. So Eric and I along with our four other team members were assembled as part of the Developing Leaders in California Libraries Leadership Challenge from December 2018 through May of 2019. So our group decided to tackle the question how can libraries position themselves as a key community player in regards to the 2020 Census? And after our six months of working together we developed a toolkit that we hope can be used by libraries throughout the state and hopefully the country. So a little bit of background what exactly is the census? So the census is conducted every 10 years in an attempt to accurately count every living person in the United States. An accurate census count is crucial as it is used to apportion the seats in the U.S. House of Representatives thus determining the number of votes that each state receives as part of the Electoral College and it also establishes how federal funds will be distributed to communities throughout the country. The 2020 Census brings about additional challenges as this will be the first year that it is conducted primarily online potentially creating barriers of access for groups within the community. So public libraries are a trusted hub of information and access and they will play a vital role in helping their community members be counted. So census data helps determine how billions of dollars in federal funds are allocated to communities around the country. In 2015 California received about 77 billion dollars in census related funds and that comprised of 80% of the total federal funding that the state received that year. And then as you can see in the chart over that 40 year period the federal funds while it more than doubled the total state spending has tripled in that same amount of time. Census data also determines how representatives are apportioned every 10 years in the U.S. House of Representatives according to the LA Times and the 2000 census a mere 18 people counted resulted in California picking up an extra congressional seat. So if you're asking yourself why should anyone participate it's important for an accurate census count as it will impact services available to the community. Data collected from the census helps stimulate economic growth it supports new legislation and policies and it also affects funding to the IMLS which directly impacts the grants that states can apply for under the library services and technology act. That fourth point is probably the most important one on the screen the 99% of hard to count census tracks are within five miles of a library. So chances are you will see a very big jump in foot traffic during census season next year. And then lastly it's also required by law and it has very long lasting impacts on your quality of life. So as I mentioned earlier the 2020 census will be the first time where the count is conducted primarily online and this will impact those hard to count and hard to reach communities which could significantly affect your accurate count. Community members are most likely to turn to the trusted hub of information and resources which would be your library. The census is also providing 1-800 numbers for people to respond over the phone. Their addresses will be verified using the satellite imagery their census workers in the field that will take count and then also the questionnaire this year will have write-in areas. So what are libraries already doing? Libraries around the state are establishing community partnerships their planning programs and anticipating their community needs and preparation for the 2020 census and we have some examples on the screen behind us. Information and resources can be shared both in and outside of library walls which can increase access for all of your community members. So we are here today to offer you a tool in the form of a toolkit that can help support you in whatever stage of planning that you are in. So our toolkit is designed for libraries of any size and budget to utilize to support your 2020 census efforts. So our main goals with the toolkit were to provide access to census related information for your staff and patrons to promote participation with the census and to promote engagement with your community members. And now I will hand it off to Eric who will go a little bit more into detail about the sections of our toolkit. Thanks. So I think one of the important things to think about when we're thinking about our toolkit is that there's a lot of great information online the ALA has provided some about what the census is and even some about the value. But what we wanted to do is provide something that was really practical something that you could take parts of and just use immediately or use as the basis for your own programming. So with that in mind we developed our toolkit and it's divided into several different parts each dedicated to a different part of the planning and creation of your census programming. So the first we wanted to do is talk about preparing your community. And the idea of that is we wanted to give you talking points want to give you talking points to communicate with your community stakeholders people who might not necessarily be interested in participating in the census or working with you to participate in the census whether that's local organizations maybe your city government who's like I don't really understand the position or you know we have some great concerns about the use of that census. We also provided resources that you can use to check the census participation both in your community but also in your large area things that you're doing but things that outside partners might be doing in your area. And we just provided reasons why the library should be involved with the census participation in your community. The second part was to get your staff involved because your staff aren't active participation participants in the census programming it's really not going to take off. So we wanted to make sure that your staff understood why we're doing the census work and what was so important. We also wanted to give them the tools to make them feel like they understood what the census is and they could communicate with your library members in a positive way. And we also wanted to tie them to training opportunities offered not just in your local community but also by local state and federal agencies. Our next step was marketing because you know that's a really difficult thing for a lot of libraries. We wanted to provide resources so you could promote the census to as large a group as possible. Wanted to help you identify who the library should target what areas that you may ignite but think about who isn't in the room in this census conversation and reach out directly to them. And we also provided a list of different marketing opportunities that you can do in various different price points from things that really require no resources and just staff time to things that are slightly more expensive such as buying ads and putting them in bus stops. And then finally wanted to provide a list of census programs. We know that sometimes you don't have a lot of time to develop those programs or you want a place to start to develop your own one. We wanted to give you programs that told your community about the census helped engage your community in the census process really to share information increase awareness and prepare. We have things for adults we have things for children and we have things for teens. And you'll find in the census examples and dedicated lesson plans for some of the events. And then finally wanted to provide a frequently asked questions section. This is really designed for your staff to answer their own questions but also to take and answer community questions. So things about how do I know if I'm being scammed by the census is it safe to take. Can I not answer a question on the census. All of these have annotated answers with resources and links to census related information that you know that the information provided your members is valid. And then finally we have a pretty extensive list of appendices things that you can pull out and provide and use directly in your service. So we have a checklist to make sure you're ready for the census. We have a list of recommended readings that we use and also that we we used we also used things that your members could be find useful. We have reading lists of books that related and believe me it's very difficult to find children's books related to the census but we found one. We also developed flyers and logos related to the census that you can use and download and add to your own programs. A game board to get people excited about the census and learning plans for some of our programs. Finally you probably are wondering where to get this. I would have printed out copies for all of you but it's about 57 pages and I like mother a little bit too much. You can find information this tool kit in a number of places. That's our bitly link to it which will link directly to our current version of the toolkit. The Pacific Library partnership has a census related web page resource with a link to this as well and the state library has a census related search area where you can find this. That's the end of our presentation. I know it's a little quick but we wanted to open up a lot of time for questions. I have a question about the satellite imagery verifying people's addresses about how that works especially for folks who don't have permanent addresses or. So the census works a little bit different for unhoused individuals. They're not tracked in the same way that somebody who has a residence is. There's no way to mail them information. So instead those residents who don't have a permanent address including people who might live in a mobile home or a houseboat are communicated to buy a different group of census workers. They'll go out to the community and talk to them on one on one. Go out to the places where they reside. Thank you. It's a great presentation. I was just going to make a quick point that my wife works in a local nonprofit and she's part of this group of different nonprofits working around the census. And I was just surprised to hear from her that like people just don't know about the census actually. And so like the amount of outreach that people will hopefully be able to do with this should be, is really great. I was surprised by that. Yeah thank you. It is really important. I mean we talked just a little bit. In Alameda County every person who's counted counts for about a thousand dollars of federal files. So over 10 years that's $10,000. People don't understand that especially because it only comes up once every 10 years. So this is the first time I've heard about the 800 number. So will it be available in languages other than English? So there will be language resources. Let me pull back and say that the census is really encouraging everybody to do everything online. So all the resources, all the information that you're going to find to say well you should fill this online application. I believe there's 18 languages that they have sort of very well translated versions of these things that I believe if you call in the number they'll connect you to a translator but I'm not 100% sure on that. If you talk to me afterwards I can communicate and try to find that information for you. But there's about 54 languages, is that right? That they are translating census-related material to most of those extra ones. Instead of being a full translation it's sort of a defined definition card that they can use to reference the information to. Any other questions? Hi I'm on my or I was at my county's complete count committee with other board of supervisors and members from different departments in our county system. And it's interesting to me as has happened in the past with other government-run social services how much extra is being asked of the libraries to help support this effort that has previously been funded and has hired additional people to help. My question is whether you have had direct contact with the US Census Bureau to find out what they're planning on doing in dispatching their own employees to assist in the libraries with people that need help taking the census on the computer so that it doesn't sap our staff time. I don't know if you can provide any insight on that. I've had my own experience with my connection with the US Census Bureau and there hasn't seemed to have been much offered. Yeah so my understanding is that the Census Bureau is not going to be like sending staff regularly to the locations but they are working with library staff to make sure that they have some training to assist or answer questions about that. This is more this is not my personal opinion rather than the official word of census but it really has seemed to me like the census is kind of continuing like normal and really the ramp up has been that we as the library community and perhaps I think we as local government institutions in California are really feeling like this is a very important census and that's who's ramping up the pressure. Yes. Do you know if the Census Bureau is anticipating a lot of potential non-participation because Trump had attempted to get a citizenship question on there and are there going to be some drive to make sure that people know that this is not an attempt which I'm assuming it's not to track non-citizens. Great question and if this toolkit had been released the same time last year there would be some very different questions about this citizenship question on there. A couple things to unpack in there. First the Census Bureau did not want to answer that question they have better tools together than information including the census the American Community Survey so this really wasn't a census derived question. They did studies about this and had some serious worries about the undercount however they did do a sort of sampler census in the last few months to see if it would have an impact. I don't remember I don't know if they've released the specific details about whether it did or it didn't have an impact on there but the Census Bureau is definitely worried about an undercount just from moving from a paper survey to an online survey. Hi I'm Amy Martin from the Oakland Public Library and I wanted to highlight a project some of my colleagues are working on. I think there's a couple people in this room. Our gender diversity task force is working on a toolkit for people who are not male or female because we learned that the census question one of the required questions on the census is sex and the answer the options are only the binary sex and so that leaves out anybody who is not male or female and we have found very few resources there's nothing in ALA's toolkit about it there's nothing in Equality California didn't have anything about it so I just wanted to let people know that Oakland Library has a task force that's working on this question as you probably found from your research it's not legal to skip a question and not answer it's not likely to be prosecuted but you can't just not answer that question and there is no legal answer for people for example who have an X on their driver's license in California you can't answer it legally so we have staff who are working on that now and I'm happy to share what they come up with. Yeah I would love it if you did connect with us about that and we can see at the very least connect to the work you've done in our toolkit maybe include some of the things in our toolkit and perhaps in ALA's toolkit as well. Yeah I will say the process is that if you don't answer a question they will follow up with you and they'll kind of nag you about filling out a question and yes it is technically illegal not to answer one of those questions if I answer it incorrectly but I believe the last time somebody was prosecuted is in 1980. Sorry I'll ask a question in the toolkit or you know in talking about this do you does there need to be a verbiage that we provide patrons to assure them that this is not information the library itself is collecting and taking you know because we are a trusted place that people go to making sure that if they are filling out the census that they feel safe that we're not actually getting the info and also that they can feel safe you know kind of going back to the previous questions but they can feel safe submitting that information. I think the safety of our patrons our members and their security and their privacy is one of the important parts of the toolkit and a lot of our talking points speak to that. I don't think we have a toolkit question that specifically addresses that this is information the census is going to collect and not the library but all our descriptions were very clear that it is the U.S. government census that wants this information not the library. I'm sorry I can't recall whether you covered this in your presentation but do you is there anything in the toolkit about addressing cybersecurity concerns they were talking about like security of information but also like getting scammed like people getting texts that say it's from the U.S. census and kind of how to weed that out because I know a lot of our elderly patrons in particular are really paranoid and rightfully so. Yeah this is actually one of the areas where the census bureau itself does a pretty good job so we link directly to their resources and in both our frequently asked questions and preparing our staff area when we talk about educating our members we talk about how to recognize whether this is authentic census information it actually came in really useful for me the other week because one of my paraprofessionals came in with a thing from the census like is this real looks like a scam to me so we used it and it turns out it was. It was real it was like American crime survey or something and I asked if they had ever been a victim of a crime that seemed real weird to me but now they ask it. I'll remind you. And I think this will be the last one. Hi I am from San Diego County I work really closely with Elizabeth Ghani so we're super aware of the census and I just wondered whether or not your library systems are participating in outreach in those communities that are expected to be under counted. I know in San Diego we are working at 13 of our library branches with actually having on-site community-based organizations at our branches in order to deliver that information in the best way possible. Yeah so very quickly in our toolkit that's one of the areas that we talk about is communicating and working with community and organizations to deliver information about the census you know the people who are trusted by your undercounted communities are the people you should be reaching out to. In Alameda County where I work it's a lot of unincorporated areas and a lot of small cities so each branch is taking control of who they communicate with and reach out to but that's something that we've been really encouraging and empathizing in our group. Do you want to speak to yours? Sure yeah and in Sacramento I work at one of the 28 libraries that are within the system and so our community engagement manager has really taken on that role of being the census person within our group. She's working towards getting census action kiosks placed in all of our libraries and then we're going to be hosting a let's talk about forum discussion all about civility in February of next year leading up to the census. Well thank you so much for listening to us.