 Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem. Assalamu alaikum everyone, thank you so much for being here. My name is Aliza and I'm one of the CARES staff from the San Francisco Bay Area office. Some of you know some of our colleagues and we're going to do introductions in just a little bit. So if we could go ahead and go to the next slide, we're opening up our program. Thanks for waiting and I just want to start out by acknowledging that we are on the land of the Ohlone people and we acknowledge that they are still here, they still exist and we respect them and the history of the way that land has been taken from indigenous people throughout this country in extremely violent and really horrible, you know systematically violent ways over our history and we were not the first people so it's really critical for us to acknowledge that they were not wiped out, they are still here and there's resources to learn more about that. So if anyone's interested in that, feel free to raise that later. And why we're here, so I'm here with several of our staff that work in the advocacy department of the organization. So people might be familiar that we have a legal department, we have programs, we have our operations people, we have our communications person, our development person, but really a big chunk of our staff capacity goes towards outreach and government relations. So we wanted to use this as an opportunity to both kind of introduce ourselves or reintroduce ourselves to folks and also most importantly hear from you. So it's an opportunity to just get to know each other, connect, tell you a little bit about what we're working on but the main priority for today is to hear from you on what you see as the major issues in the community, the major needs and challenges and opportunities and the main reason for that is that we're embarking on a major amping up of our civic engagement work, civic engagement meaning voter engagement, census engagement and we'll talk more about that but the really important thing to keep in mind is we can't do that work successfully without the community really being engaged and excited and feeling like it's actually responding to some of the things that you see in your day to day lives and in the community as really urgent. So does that make sense? How many of you just show of hands, how many of you have done something like this this year where you went to like a community conversation or a listening session even if it wasn't by care just by show of hands? Okay. So maybe a couple of us, okay. All right so that's just that's helpful to know right because this is kind of like sort of new territory for a lot of us which is fine. So just wanted to encourage that this is very informal so you should feel free to get up, move around, get food, we brought the food for you to eat, go to the bathroom and if you have any questions or any comments like at any point feel free to just raise your hand and we can address those. So next slide please Minna, thank you. This is our agenda. We started a little late as Muslims usually do so that was expected but no problem and we are about to do some introductions so I'm going to stop talking and we're going to hear from all of us a little bit. We have a little ice breaker, very low stakes, low pressure just to kind of warm us up to getting into the mode of talking to each other and engaging and then me and my colleagues Minna are going to talk a little bit about what exactly the advocacy department kind of does. We're going to have some group conversation, we're going to break up into dyads or triads so even smaller than we are right now to really get deep into a few questions that we have for you and then we're going to bring it back to the whole group to close out and kind of talk a little bit about some opportunities heading into 2020 of how people who might be interested could get engaged or be more engaged in some of the civic engagement work that is coming with a new presidential election which is happening next year but we'll talk about how there's some things that will be starting up in the spring namely because we have two big events happening in March one is our primary election on March 3rd and the other one is the U.S. Census which only happens every 10 years but it's happening this year in beginning in March so any questions about that? So I wanted to start us off with a few guidelines for how we're going to engage today so I'm going to point to can everybody see this poster right here yeah okay so basically these are just some sort of informal rules of engagement that pretty much we probably all relate to in some way because we've all been in group situations where maybe we didn't feel heard or we didn't feel seen and we didn't feel like our voice was really a part of that conversation so these guidelines are really just to help us all inshallah get to the point where we feel that this was a space when we walk away from this space today where everybody who wanted to speak had a chance to speak and everybody felt listened to and it was a really healthy and productive conversation okay so um can I get some volunteers to just read maybe we can let's just do this let's just go like one by one and each person takes thank you Sakina each person just reads one of them listen to understand does anyone want to like just speak to what that means what does that mean to you there's no right answer I'm just like just like listen you know focus focus on what they're saying kind of focus on what they're saying try to understand right because sometimes it's really easy for us to be like but I think this but that's not the the point it does matter what you think but we also want to strive towards understanding what this person means and where they're coming from otherwise this is not really a dialogue it's just a back and forth that's what we want to avoid yeah don't over over judge yeah try to hold back your judgment yeah all right cool uh don't yuck my young so what do we think that means it's okay this is not a test I I recently learned this so don't yuck my young just means like sometimes someone feels really passionately about something and this is like their core belief and they they rule this is a point of view that they feel really strongly about and then we might be like that's not what I think but instead of coming you know at it with judgment and saying well I think this or I disagree with that and shutting the person down which can be easy to do right I'm sure we've all done it I have um try to just accept that everybody has their own perspective so kind of in the lens uh with listen to understand and then the next one land the plane what did that mean what do we think that means I'm not sure so does anyone else like me here like to talk a lot and kind of go on and on and on only me oh my god thank you so land the plane is just a reminder like if you're flying that plane and you're just talking talking talking talking what is the point like you you need to land the plane at some point it's just not safe if you you know keep talking so that's just like a metaphor for try to wrap it up understand that we're only here for you know a certain amount of time and then we need to move on we have other things to do today there's another event after this at three right so realistically we could sit here and talk forever but try to land the plane that's a reminder to myself too and the next one uh move up move back so um I'll just explain that real quick that's just you know if you um notice that you're talking a lot like frequently you're talking and then it's quiet and then you're talking again try to push yourself to move back and just listen and it's okay for there to be silence and it's okay for other people might take them a little longer to engage that's okay but just try to be conscious of well I've been talking a lot so I'm just gonna you know try to listen a little bit more and the next one one mic anyone know what that means yeah don't interrupt don't interrupt specifically it means don't interrupt like if someone's talking don't interrupt try not to interrupt pretty straightforward and then the last one it's all one yeah what's said here stays here what's learned here sleeps here okay so this one um it's a little bit of a like conceptual thing that uh there's gonna be some things that people might say that they don't really want everyone in the world to know about so um I'm not gonna be like oh well you know after today I'm not gonna go out and say did you know that Samina experienced this like yeah she was talking all about it let me like break it down for you she was here when this happened and then this is her experience and yeah like isn't that wild and you know in the meantime not only did I not get her permission but also even if you know I asked her she might just feel like that's something that's private and it was something that was a part of this space it might not be appropriate for people to know in other spaces so just as a rule of thumb if there's something personal that someone shares and you can tell it was something about their personal experience try not to share it in other spaces if they want to share it in other spaces they will right we can assume that that makes sense so does anyone have any questions about any of these or have anything that they want to add anything else come to mind of the kind of space that we want to have to make this a real dialogue so I think basically what it comes down to is to be a good listener and don't be judgmental move on like you said land the plane yeah yeah totally um just be considerate of it and what we're hoping to demonstrate here today by doing this you know event and thank you so much to brother mania and mcc spay I should have said that at the beginning um is that you know as an organization we do a lot of talking at people where we're like these are your rights this is how you exercise them we're going to train you on how to be an effective bystander we're going to you know teach you some political education but we really want to balance that with listening so we're committed to listening it seems like you all taking the time out of saturday to be here you're committed to listening so this is just some ways to hold each other accountable to exactly that thank you so much trying to listen more than talk okay thank you everyone for participating so now we're just going to do a little bit of an overview of some of the work that we do just to help you understand um more about what brings us here so I actually want to hand the mic to samina to share about our government relations work right sound like um again thank you again for coming today I as you know mentioned it is important um to hear from you to hear from the community you know because again we we might be seeing things um you know in other spaces but we aren't actually living you we're not living your lives we're not seeing how it's like for you at school or for you at work or you know just driving around we don't see what your day-to-day lives are and what are some of the things that are impacting you so it's important to to hear that so that being said um I just wanted to share a little bit um more information about my work so again I'm the government relations coordinator for care um what I do is that I um meet regularly with elected officials to share with them about what's happening in the community to share with them some of the experiences uh what we do every year is that we put together a civil rights report or a legal report of all the cases that we um have been hearing so just to take a step back what our office does is that we provide free legal services to people experiencing any um islamophobic discrimination hate crimes any school bullying any FBI harassment and also we offer immigration services as well and so um we put together a legal report every year and every other year we put together a bullying report and so we hear about how what what are your experiences at school have you experienced any bullying any um have you experienced it from your teachers so what we found um and I we have a new report now so I haven't memorized the numbers but two years ago we found that 53 percent of students said that they experienced some form of bullying and we found that 38 percent said that they experienced it from their teachers and 36 percent of those who wore hijab they said that it was like inappropriately touched or pulled off so that data I use that when I meet with elected officials to share with them what is happening in the community what are the number of hate crimes that are happening we document even if even if there's a somebody who yells something out the window we need to hear from you like we need to hear if if you've experienced that or if you've had a problem like if somebody was you know bothering you at the grocery store or whatever it's good just for you to let us know by documenting it um it takes two minutes to go to our website um and just to document anyway so going back to what I do I take that information I meet with the elected officials and then also I legislate I try to push for legislation that impact not only the Muslim community but the greater community as well in terms of civil rights so to give you some examples so I work on with elected officials on the city level the county level the state level and the federal level so and in my territory is a nine bay area county so I have to drive a lot I ended up driving from Santa Rosa or to Salinas so it's um those are the elected officials that I meet with so some of the the key pieces of legislation that we've worked on we've done a lot actually in Oakland we've done um we passed um the uh a facial recognition ban actually the first facial recognition ban we passed was in San Francisco um but we passed a um you know facial recognition ban saying that we should not be using equipment or technology in order to track um what your faces um or to track people based on you know their faces because that technology one is not actually accurate um you have 38 percent of African American women that are um that they're that they're mistakes made um saying that there might be somebody else um and then also some violation of one's privacy we've passed a number of surveillance ordinances around the bay area saying that if the police want to acquire any technology any surveillance technology that we have to have a public discussion we have to have a public dialogue about it and there needs to be some policies put in place as to how to use it we've passed other bills an anti-registry bill the the saying that no one should be tracked or registered based on their religion their race their sexual orientation um you know or whatnot they should not be tracked and so we have we passed that in the state of California so again there's a number of pieces of legislation that we've been able to pass that impact you that impact all of us and impact our civil rights and so um but what I do and what's what in order to get some of this legislation passed I bring community members with me to to these meetings um and then we meet with with different elected officials um so then we can hear from you and what your experiences are um we also try to bring out community members to come to some of these hearings like when we had the Burke in Berkeley um there was a a council member who was trying to pass a bill or an ordinance that had to deal with ones um saying that there cannot be any discrimination based on one's um hairstyles or based on if they're wearing hijab or if I you know man chooses to wear a beard um for religious reasons or cultural reasons there should be no discrimination and so we we have been able to pass a lot of these bills and alhamdulillah we got a number of people to come out to Berkeley to speak on on this ordinance and and alhamdulillah that that passed unanimously so so again it's not just about us doing these meetings and us doing these the the the meetings and and passing this legislation it's about all of us not just care all of us need to work together to pass that so that being said I wanted to hear a little bit about you what are some of your you know experiences like in the community what are some of the things that you can say hmm you know I wonder I wonder if there could be like a bill or an ordinance or something changed you know that I see in our community what would I love to to see changed so I kind of want to you know like I think I talked enough I just want to turn it over to you guys and hear from you because what we're going to do in a little bit is you guys are going to get to talk and reflect more deeply like yeah on your own um and with each other and then out of that we're going to have a group debrief which part of it is that we can address that so no that's okay thank you so and then I just wanted to quickly overview we have an outreach coordinator whose name is Osama people might know him and he's our other team member he was unfortunately not able to be here because he's on vacation so fortunate for him but sad for us but he'll be back very soon yeah he's he's he's taking a much deserved break um but some of his main responsibilities would be he coordinates our jump out reach so every single Friday the majority of our staff if not everybody is out all across the bay area driving all across the bay um to physically be at different massages and share resources be there for people to ask questions um and to seek any kind of help that they might need um so that's one major thing that Osama coordinates and then he also looks for different opportunities for um the community to build community with each other so whether that is Muslims are coordinating different events or um ways to engage with each other like rallies or demonstrations or meetings um or non-Muslims who are friends and allies he tries to keep an eye out for those opportunities connect people to them um and just try to build the relationships so that people um feel like they have a voice and that they are not alone and they're working with other people so the intersection of both Samina and Osama's work is the community so like Samina was saying the reason that our work is as impactful as it is is because the community engages in it and so that's why we are here today is to try to you know see how we can better work with you all and be your partners not just people who serve you but really work with you with that and then the next step is we're just going to go to um into our small group breakouts and this is really again the heart of why we're here today is for us all to connect and talk to each other and pull out some key themes of what we're all thinking about so the way we're going to do that is we're going to break out into small groups and we're going to do that in a minute after reviewing the questions that we're going to be answering but we're going to take probably half an hour um and just go through with our partners that are in our small group these three questions number one what are the main issues that impact my community my community I just want to emphasize let's try to think as locally as possible so either the East Bay or your city but try to think um very like locally because that will generate maybe more specific you know ideas um but it's okay if you name issues like Islamophobia that we all know it's a worldwide problem if that's an issue that's relevant to your community we should still make note of that but just um wanted to clarify because sometimes people say community and then everyone's confused like what does community even mean so we're thinking very locally and then um the second question is what are the challenges and facing these issues because they wouldn't be issues if there's some challenge in addressing them right so for example homelessness why are there this is literally a question that keeps me up is how has it come to the point that we have not just homelessness but growing homelessness in the Bay Area to the point that people are living in villages and neighborhoods on the street what is the challenge in addressing that there's a number of challenges in addressing that problem it's not just by coincidence right and then the last question is um what are some of the ways that we can start to think about how to get involved with each other and with our community to address and take action on these issues so this is not we're not going to sit here today and map out like a campaign strategy and say like these are the actions that we're going to take we don't need to do that all today but we really need to just break down what are the main issues and challenges that we face and then at the end um Samina and our friend from the census that will introduce in a bit um or towards the end we will start to think about ways that people can get involved so does everybody kind of have an idea of what we're doing with three questions yeah yeah so I this is what the point of this group conversation is is to pull out like common themes so who wants to share out next so I think one of the main couple issues we talked about was actually like targeting in schools by teachers and things like that just based off sometimes just your name or if you wear a hijab or something like that another thing we talked about is like actually going out to the community and creating change and actually voting for elected officials that could make change in community um yeah that's pretty much kind of the main things we talked about I believe a major issue that affects our community is the image and perception of our community um we're always portrayed as the bad guys in the news we're always portrayed as terrorists and we really need to change that we we need to like this also ties into like education as well because we need to get more and more you know most of people hire up in politics and you know in the societal level to make it easier for the rest of our community um yeah yeah just other positions of leadership as well till you don't so like you know we basically represent the true values of Islam in education as well and you know it's it's easier for people you don't get job easier for most of people to get jobs and stuff less discrimination kind of if we get to the higher positions in society actually I just wanted to add to this we we thought that some of the issues which are impacting our communities are gun violence you know domestic violence and also Islamophobia was very important and in that you know peer pressure when you know especially with people trying to confirm in the society because you look different especially when you're wearing a job and those kind of things and we thought that some of the challenges which we could deal with with would be like volunteering in the community going to interfaith events showing just showing up there and just show a good faith I mean and the way to come back to Islamophobia would be to you know give the right information because there's lots of misinformation out there that's what it is. Relationship building and leadership for sure and anybody else from either of the other groups that's fine that yeah that's perfect as far as what could be done and this is a little outside of my area expertise but challenges would be figuring out how to do a better job organizing in the mosjids and organizing the mosjids among each other in themselves. Obviously care is great and appreciated but we need more. Personally this come up is the cultural divide between the suburban and inner city mosques and the sort of recreation of the discrimination that we're supposed to be combating. I don't want to move back too much yeah yeah this is a organizer so I think with I think we talked about when the mosques get together there's too many Indians not enough I mean too many chiefs and not enough Indians too many cooks in the kitchen right and and so there everybody wants to kind of impart their own ideas there but not necessarily hear others so it's it's failed every time we try to kind of bring the mosques together because there's too much so I look at the Mormon church I look at the Catholic church and there's a diocese as a hierarchical system but we don't have that humblah we're a big tent of religion there's a lot of diversity but sometimes that hurts us as well because we don't have a uniform unified voice. Going into other communities sometimes and I hear this from a lot of people African-American especially they feel very ousted when they go to other communities and people treat them as if they're very ignorant to Islam and maybe they just became Muslim yesterday and they don't know anything oh sister do you pray like I I mean you you run into this and I just lived in the Middle Eastern country for 10 years I just came back so they'll you may speak to someone and they'll say oh you're Muslim no I just dress like this you know it's like no I just you know I just want to fit in with you but it's just it's a common thing you know and you face it by you're saying Muslims just to clarify yeah this is I'm talking about within the Muslim community you know between like they said the divide between suburban and inner city masajids and so that's that's a you know that's a big issue that we have within our community without even having to go outside of the Muslim community we have lots and lots of issues outside of the Muslim community but we also have a lot of internal issues that we need to deal with thank you so much for sharing that personal experience and what was your name sister because I know you say it okay thank you say then brother Norman are here from Oakland right you all are coming from Oakland so thank you for coming so far can I actually sorry one second hold that thought was there another group that didn't get to speak okay can we before you share yours okay yeah if we could have the youth speak so another issue we talked about in the youth especially like in schools was how racism it's become like a norm it's seen as a joke anytime it comes up it's always seen as a joke not only like the people that are being racist but also the people that are being racist against everyone thinks it's a joke that's how normal it is I think if you collect somehow get people to realize that it's not supposed to be a joke that could really like change things so real quick recap and Sikina has been making some notes of common themes thank you all so much for sharing on that and it sounds like you know what we're talking about is like sister say that said a lot of the challenges are within and they're very accessible to us because we don't need to look to oh what are other people doing to Muslims or what are other people saying about Muslims just within our own community there's opportunities for us to improve and like you were just saying what's your name again Monique that you know even the people who are facing the prejudice have normalized it and have let it just be treated as a joke so and that's not you know necessarily their fault but that is a problem that's a problem that the people who are experiencing the harm are also normalizing the harm so I just want to really thank you I know we could sit here all day and talk forever about all of these issues I know it's very challenging to pinpoint some common themes but I just want to say like this is one of many conversations we really inshallah hope to have more and more frequent events like this especially hearing from people that this is valuable to do on a regular basis and not just one offs that is very helpful to hear and I want to tell Zahra that when I see her on Monday actually I might see her tomorrow you know that this is this is actually adding value to our community is just sitting down and talking about things that we all already know what's going on but actually actually talking through it and so in that spirit I want to give Samina and brother Norman a chance to talk about some different ways to get involved one thing I'm going to say is that somebody mentioned volunteering right so I want to start us off with talking about different opportunities of other ways that you all can continue to get involved and we're inviting you to lean on us as a resource to get involved okay so number one we are actually currently building a volunteer team for care that is specifically focused on voter engagement and census engagement and helping people be empowered and informed when it comes to voting in the primary which like I said is in March and also the other big event in March which is the US census but I'm not going to talk too much about it because brother Norman is actually here on behalf of the US census so we have a Muslim in leadership because he's literally with the government and working for the census so I'm so happy thank you so much for being here and sister Saida um but if you're interested in any of the opportunities that we're about to talk about we have space over here arefa has laid out um different posters that correspond to the different opportunities so the one that I just mentioned which is volunteering to help us call people go knock on doors um different ways that we're going to help engage voters um if you're interested in that then you would on your way out before you leave you would write your name under this poster that I want to help make sure that Muslims and our friends and allies vote and that they fill out their census and I want to learn more about it you're not committing to it you're just expressing interest so I'm not going to follow up with you and say well now I have you on my volunteer list I'm just going to say you are interested in learning more about this so I wanted to follow up with you does that make sense and then I'm going to turn it over to Samina because um she has a couple of specific things that she can share about how people can connect to their local elected officials and then the state legislature so again I wanted to thank you for sharing your thoughts and taking part in the these small group discussions I think it was really helpful um and I think one of the things that we were discussing in our in our groups actually a couple opportunities in order to get involved and to get engaged so as I mentioned before there are you know pieces of legislation that we've been pushing whether it be on the city level the county level the state level or the federal level now a lot of you guys talked about school bullying um one of the things that I um I wanted to and I mentioned in our group is that we were able to pass two bills statewide that deal with bullying but one of the bills that we were not able to get passed was dealing with an ethnic studies program so that is most likely going to be a bill that we're going to be supporting this upcoming year so one way in order to get involved with this bill or any other pieces of legislation is to join me for any of these meetings that I have with elected officials so if you live in Fremont you live in I mean wherever you live I can I'm planning to be setting up meetings with elected officials to talk about these um either these issues or to talk about legislation and I would love if you guys can join me and you can meet with your local council member you can meet with your local assembly member state senator congress member I can I will be setting up those meetings anyway and I would love and it makes it even more impactful to hear from people like you rather than just to hear from me because me I'm representing an organization you guys actually live in those cities and this impacts you directly so that's one way it's going in from meetings second thing is um we have every single year and I mentioned it in our group we have uh we send we we bring hundreds of people from the Bay Area actually we bring hundreds of people around California but our office brings from the Bay Area to Sacramento to meet with your elected officials on one day so we set up dozens of meetings with elected officials and we try to push these pieces of legislation so if you guys are interested please come out and take part in it we we'll take you on a bus you don't even have to like figure out your transportation we got food we got breakfast lunch you know and then different interesting kind of events that have been during the day on the downtime you know in between meetings so we'd love for you to come out I don't know how many of you actually been how many of you have been to Muslim Day at the Capitol how many of you've actually ever been to the Capitol okay that's good at least we got some more people come to the Capitol but we but to come collectively it's a it's an amazing experience so we'd love for you to come for that um another thing that would be really helpful is that you know oftentimes people think oh you know if I write to my elected official it's it's not going to make a difference actually it does make a big difference because sometimes if an elected official is not sure if they're going to vote on a bill and they're like okay should I do it this way or that way they'll look to see how many people have called in on the issue and how many people have written in on the issue now if there are more people that have written in on the issue or called in on the issue you know that are in favor of it than those who didn't they will actually vote for the bill sometimes they just don't have time to or they don't really take the time to analyze it they'll just go based on public opinion which is kind of a it works in our favor if we get our people to to actually go and take part what we do is that we make it very easy for you you don't have to draft any any letter or anything we have the letter drafted for you you just put your name and your your address email address and then we send it over to the elected official so that's one really great way in order to make an impact so again these are these are concrete ways for you to make a difference when it comes to government and your legislation meeting with elected officials either in the meetings that I have locally coming to Sacramento if almost some day at the Capitol or writing into your elected officials and we already have the template for you for that so I think that's that's about it yeah so if you're interested please write your name on on them one of the the boards thank you thank you Samina so Samina does a lot she's also one person so even just practically it's helpful to her yeah so even if you're like I don't care about elected officials they don't care about me I have I feel some type of way about elected officials the only way that we can hold them accountable is by showing up or even just there's different ways to speak out you can write them you can call them sorry last thing also when I think I did mention it a little bit earlier but coming out to hearings oftentimes whenever so whenever a city council is trying to vote on an issue we want to make sure that the room is packed with community members to come out and say yes we are in support of this issue you know like the hijab bill there's another one that I'm working on it has to do with the militarization of our local and police department you know that they're using military equipment against civilian populations we I we're not in favor of that and so we want to make sure we get community members to come out you know so then we could put pressure on our elected officials to vote there sometimes some elected officials are like ah you know like right now we're we're concerned about something in alameda we're trying to get people to come out to vote for surveillance ordinance we've been told that we need to get community support for that otherwise they're not they're kind of wavering on that issue so again that does make a difference so if you ever want to come out for a hearing again come to a meeting come to most of the Capitol please contact our office and we'd love to have a huge take part and if you have thoughts about how it would be easier for you to participate and how you would like to participate but you're facing challenges that's also information that samina really wants to hear so what we're talking about here today is there's different ways to engage with the political system voting it puts people into office it it can pass ballot initiatives that will turn into laws or regulations that people in government are carrying out on our behalf that we have said that we prioritize right um participating with a legislative process and how decision makers make decisions that's another way and then i want to invite brother norman up to share about what the significance is of the census what is it why is it important to us how can people get involved and potentially even get paid to work with the census um and before i do that i just want to explain everybody has a sticky note um and what i'm asking you to do is just before you leave just write down one plus and one delta meaning something positive and something you would like to have us consider to change or adjust or add or take out um from today's experience so something that was a positive and something that you would um want us to consider changing does that make sense just one thing each or if you have a lot of thoughts talk to me i'll be here and where you're going to leave these sticky notes if everybody could just look where um rfa is pointing back there um that poster on your way out if you could just leave your sticky note on that poster that would be great all right brother norman thank you asalamu alaikum thanks for the invitation uh these kind of experiences are very very important because uh as we discuss things you know listening to some of the youngsters uh they get it they understand what's going on and uh we need to encourage them to provide their solutions because it's a problem that they would deal with and have to solve but my purpose here today is to invite you to participate in the census on both levels as an employee and as a person who's counted see everything is political and it's as you know in this country everything is political those who say well you know i'm not involved in politics well politics is involved with you it's involved with you on a daily basis like it or not you don't have to like it it's reality that's going on internationally particularly as a concerned uh muslims as you know with all terrorists uh and the black ones uh something else well whatever but uh and not real muslims but you don't see that a lot of things that that we have to consider but being counted is very very important because they ask when when care or see i regard care as uh the muslim nwcp essentially serving the same kind of purpose and uh that's very important because all of the progress without that kind of leadership and centralized leadership we don't make it as a community those of us in the black community who are muslim have had to fight on two or three fronts all at the same time and it's free a lot of people to be muslim but her job problem i mean the covering of the head of women has been i mean we've had to literally turn out schools i mean show up and raise health partner language but actually do that so that all youngsters didn't get harassed you know by teachers and everybody else so we've had to do that better and it's a continuous thing like i said the youngsters get it and they understand now the census the census is one of the few things that's actually required by the constitution in fact it is a crime not to participate in the census if they if the census cares to push it there have only been two prosecutions in the history of the census and let me tell you why it was necessary to do that and why the census decided to push it it is against the law so it's a first-class felony to advocate against participation in the census and the person that was that was tried at a newspaper in the middle in the middle west where he was in his paper advertising and encouraging people to boycott the census and even after after a decree from the courts continued he said it was part of his freedom of speech so they prosecuted him he got a nickel which means five years in jail and $250,000 they really have to do that and the person you know they have three ways normally to participate in the census this time and they've added a court as it says here the only way to apply for a job is online and i like all of you you have the 18 and you have to be um speak english and uh you're citizen we have uh and we're particularly interested in people who have mastered other languages or whose language is their first language the census comes out the questionnaire comes out in five languages english spanish korean chinese and uh to gala that's normal but our literature comes out in 52 languages which covers most of the languages uh most of the major languages just give me an instance then in the city of okla there are two main chinese languages mandarin canines and i know of at least 15 chinese dialects which without the use of the other language they would not be able to communicate with each other so it's very important and the census back to the census itself the census is used as a way of determining a lot of things first thing the number of representatives say for instance california has 53 congress people if the count goes down they can lose representation if the count goes up it could gain representation so it's very important to be counted now when it comes to particular communities uh the muslim community black communities and other communities we get representation and we get influence based on our numbers and in our showing up so it's very important for us muslims to register so that we increase the influence that we have that's the part that's the part and the beauty of it is some of us can even work for the census while doing that this is my sixth census i've worked every census in 1960 and i keep coming back because i've realized how important it is and um if you're in alameda county none of the jobs paid under 20 dollars uh we don't give you a chance to uh just take one and pass it and real quick i just sorry brother norman i just want to note that even um if you are a youth you're eligible to work for the census as long as you turn 18 by the end of this year so as long as you will be 18 by the end of this year you actually could apply and it's it's really flexible and i'll let him talk more about that yeah thank you for mentioning because that's important uh the jobs they're major the uh their clerical jobs in the office their management jobs 90 percent of the jobs are the jobs in the field and we call them numerators the enumerator actually that term and that title came from the constitution itself because the constitution says that every year the government shall enumerate the population so we call the people who are out working in the field enumerate uh it's important that you not only enroll yourself you know apply yourself but pass the word on i'll give you a challenge that we have right here this in the city of Oakland between now and the end of january you need to hire 1300 our applicant pool at this point is around 35 that's not enough to hire 1300 people from the reason i say that if you go some of them are going to pass the background check and some of them by the time we get around to them we'll have found other jobs and uh some of the classes when they learn that they've got to go through the door or learn what the actual job is people decide that it's not something that they want to do so in order to hire those 1300 people we need an applicant who's somewhere around eight or nine thousand folks so not only i'll close with this not only do i encourage you to apply yourself but encourage your friends because all of us know somebody who needs a job and all of us in fact know somebody that we wish would get a job you know so that we didn't have to support it you know but uh just you know feel free i'll be around a while to ask any questions and you can always reach me at the uh if you call the main census line thank you and ask for the local office you'll get me so i'd like to thank you thank you for your time and your attention and i've really enjoyed this thank you brother norman can we get a round of applause for brother norman that is so inspiring how many censuses have you worked with he's worked with he's worked on almost seven since that's seven decades you all that's that is commitment that that is muslim leadership and that is giving back to your community so even if you can't work with the census like i said you have an opportunity to volunteer with care or with other groups to help make sure that our communities are counted it's a really a lot at stake we could lose money for public services we could lose political representation it's a big deal it only happens every 10 years so again we had a lot to cover today but it was really helpful to have brother norman join us because we only get this opportunity every 10 years so we are going to take the time and invest the time to talk about it for every person who doesn't take part in the census we can lose up to ten thousand dollars per person who does not take part in the census so that is it's really concerning these are of course all you know the the resources that we need to keep our roads like and keep our systems running like school lunches housing medical services we should talk about that more let's just let's let's connect with brother norman because the way that it's going like he's saying they don't have enough people so i i do wonder is there any opportunity for you to get some kind of compensation yeah even if you turn 18 after it's just it's a government job so sometimes there's like really technical requirements so um i just want to go ahead and close with a quick um couple of things so one thing is again if you are interested in learning more about any of the opportunities we just talked about where can you indicate your interest on one of these posters over here in the corner there's a marker down there and then where can you put your little evaluation sticky note on the poster on your way out and if possible i think it would be really great to get a group picture before we leave so if you'd like to be a part of that maybe we could gather up here but can we just go around real quick and just say one word that's like on our um in our minds right now as we're getting ready to leave it could be anything so i'm just going to start inspired informed unity beneficial educated influenced empowered unity eye-opening feedback learning helpful engaged informed encouraged action helpful common platform pumped okay thank you guys so um let's give ourselves a round of applause for being here today and being committed to each other in our community