 I'm Marcia Joyner and are you counted? And today we are going to visit with the people from census that actually do the work. And we're going to talk about why this is the most important time of your life. You must, you must, you must be counted. So that's what we're going to do today. And so let me introduce our guest. I'll start with Annie Mae. Where are you? Can you raise your hand? There she is. Hi again. And Elizabeth, is that that I pronounced it right? Yes. Yes. And Elizabeth is her, she's responsible for counting Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders. Is that correct? Yes. There are two of us, which is Charlotte Poye, our team lead. Yes. She is a partnership specialist team and I am responsible for the native Hawaiian Pacific Island count. Now, that is a big job. Let's start with Annie Mae. Talk to me about what it is exactly that your group of people here in Hawaii do. What, what is it, do you, how do you count, what are you counting for, and where does all this what happens with the money? Oh, let's start at the beginning. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, it's been a year or almost a year since we first came to your show, Miss Marsha. And you really have navigated this journey with us, this census journey. And it, you know, supposed to be end last May and we're still here, you know, to the unprecedented pandemic. But our team actually is the community partnership and engagement team. So there's actually seven of us right now here in Oahu. We work with our local government, our state government, the local government, and our community organizations to make sure that our hard to count populations here in Hawaii are counted and that they are educated about the importance of the census. So our main purpose and role is really to educate and encourage our community to respond. And we have, since we started last year, we have created numerous hundreds of partnerships across the state of Hawaii, whether it's government, nonprofit partnerships, businesses, churches, faith-based organizations, you name it, we have touch base with them and to really help us and multiply the effort that the US Census is doing, we cannot reach all of the communities, you know, but with the help of our partners, we were able to do a really effective outreach across the state of Hawaii to make sure that everyone is educated about the census and know the importance of the census. And, you know, we do it for apportionment purposes, for redistricting, and also to make sure that we get our fair share of federal funds that goes to our schools, our healthcare system, our roads, you name it, any program that the federal government is funding, it is based on census count. So it's very important that we respond. And as you know, I have been campaigning for years to have everybody counted because if everyone in Hawaii is counted and you don't have to be a citizen, you don't have to have any of that, you just have to live here. Exactly. If everyone does that, we can have a see a third district, CD3. Some of the states have already lost count, so we can add a congressional person and that would be wonderful. That would be wonderful and we shall know after the result of the census is calculated and that would be nice. But yeah, it's very important for our voices in government to make sure that we are accurately counted. You don't have to be a citizen as long as you live here in the United States, you should be counted in the census. Elizabeth, am I saying this right? Elizabeth? Yes, Elisabeth. Elisabeth, I like that. Okay, now you were from where sweetheart? I'm originally from Samoa, from the territory of the US, which is American Samoa and also have lived here since 1998. Oh great. So now you're responsible for counting people from that are Hawaiian and Pacific Islands, right? Is that correct? Yes. Our focus with our CPAP program, which Annie had explained, is the development of our partnerships within the community and also working diligently to ensure that partnership is well-grounded in terms of supporting the census operation within our state. So all of us are unique in our own culture as well as our languages. So since I speak Samoan, I was selected to be a partnership specialist, also pushing for the general population count, but more focused on the Pacific Island communities. So even with Far, Charlotte Foy is our team lead. She's also Native Hawaiian and her and I are also the ones that are focusing more on the NHPI, Native Hawaiian Pacific Island communities. Yes. Well now tell me about all of the different islands that live here, Tonga, the Marshall Islands, the Micronesians, you name it Guam, Saipan, and they all have different languages. So how do you deal with that or do they speak English fairly well? Most of them speak English fairly well. There is a percentage of community members that needs language assistance and the US Census Bureau have been doing such a wonderful job building those resources to help support our community members and that's the purpose of our of our program, our CPAP program to identify partners that are able to provide that assistance, that language assistance. So we have the Micronesian community with you know Marshall Islands, with different islands in the Micronesian area. So all of that population is here. So we built a strong partnership which is part of our responsibilities as partnership specialists to build a strong partnership with our community leaders such as the Marshallese Consulate General's office, you know, Miss Isabella Silk, who heads that, you know, that office. They've been working diligently to assist us as well as the We Are Oshania with Josie Howard and her organization. So the partnership within the community really helps us, like how Annie explained about looking at faith-based organizations. For example, with the Samoan community we reached out to church leaders. You know, a bulk of our Samoan community members are, you know, they attend different churches within the state. Even the outer islands, you know, outside of Oahu, there are several churches there as well. So with the church leaders, we build that partnership and empower the community. We provide the education outreach through our program and that supports the push in order for the community to be counted. We have a strong partnership with MCOL, which is the Marshallese community organization of Hawaii. And the people that are in that MCOL organization are church leaders from the Marshall Islands. So now tell me about the language, all of those different languages. And you do have someone that speaks all of them. I was a guest at an event and I think most of them were Marshallese, but they had four different languages so they had to interpret each one at a time. So the event went on and on and on. So you do have people that speak all of those marital languages. Yes, you know, we worked with the Hawaii government, Complete Count Committee, which is headed by Dr. Eugene Tien, and in the wonderful Office of Defense. And they provided brochures that are is translated, census brochures from the state level, which is translated in different languages, which includes a lot of Pacific Island languages. So the brochures were very useful for a lot of our education outreach and we were able to utilize some of those language materials. Even on our, you know, some of our partners have, you know, they translated a lot of our census materials. So when we know we're in a community, we're a large population of Marshallese, for example, we make sure that we have those resources and materials ready from the state level as well as our partnership, the community-based area. Well, what about the neighbor islands? How do you, you have people, partners on each island to do the census on each island, do you? Annie, we do have our partnership specialist in the Big Island, which is Mr. Tim Solis. He's our partnership there, and we also have some of our CRRs, we call it CRRs. These are, you know, our census recruitment assistants and staff members that are in the outer islands. I believe Maui, we do reach out to Maui from Oahu as well as when we have support from our ACO, we do provide that assistance to those, to the people living in Maui. Maui, what about Molokai, you know, those Niihau and places like that? Yes, we've been doing some outreach. Annie will share more about some of the outreach because she reached out to Manai as well. With Molokai, we have a strong community partnership with Queen Lilio Kalani Trust and several organizations. We even worked with our government agencies like, for example, Department of Education. Our library services here in the state of Hawaii with the head librarian Stacey Eldridge has been wonderful in terms of providing assistance with our different community areas. So, we reached out to several organizations on Molokai as well with Niihau. We work closely with the community college in Kaua'i. We understand that there's a large population of Niihau community members living on Kaua'i. So, you know, our team lead Charlotte Koi have done several outreach engagements to, you know, develop m-claws to enumerate our Kaua'i residents there in the Niihau, I'm sorry, Niihau. Now, for anybody that's watching that doesn't know what we're talking about, Niihau is a little island right off the coast of Kaua'i. So, Kaua'i Niihau. And they are the ones that, those Hawaiians speak the real Hawaiian language. They don't have the university's Hawaiian language or this other language. And the former mayor of Kaua'i, which includes Niihau, was making a big, big push to have them, the original, those that speak the original Hawaiian, to come to Kaua'i to teach the language, to use the language. And that's just a side note. It has nothing to do with census. I thought since we're talking about it, we have, again, for people that don't know what we're talking about. We have eight major islands. And so, when I talk about, I asked you about neighbor islands, that's what we're talking about. Neighbor islands, Kaua'i, Niihau, Lanai, Molokai, Oahu, Maui, and the Big Island. Did I leave out anybody? Did I leave out or not? Yes, and so for all the islands that we have, and language is very important. And we've been working really hard to ensure that the assistance and the language support is provided for our community members. We even have Hawaiian translated brochures. And we're so grateful to the state office, the deep-bed state office, which worked with community members to help translate all of our census materials in our native, you know, the Pacific Island languages, as well as all of the languages in the state of Hawaii. We live in an ethnically diverse society. And even in Hawaii, you know, it's a lot of cultures and languages. And that is so unique. With the work that we do, another unique thing about it, we establish partners in the community or in the government level. And that's how you know networks and be able to identify the resources out there to support the census operation. And that is the most beautiful, you know, thing about working in this work, the census. And it's helping us. And what we are encouraging our community is not to wait. This is the time for everyone to respond right now, because it's very important for all of us. And we matter in terms of our own community and our own cultures and we are unique, but we do matter to be counted in the census. Oh, now I have one question speaking of languages. We have pigeon. Now, anybody translate to pigeon? Well, we have our native Hawaiian community members that are fluent pigeon speakers. Yes. We actually have a strong partnership with the University of Hawaii you know, Native Hawaiian, you know, organizations. We also have, we've established a partnership with our, you know, Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Kamehameha, CNHA with the Council of Native Hawaiian Advancement. Actually, I want to mention in this show that the coordinator or the coordination of all of our native Hawaiian Pacific Island organizations is under the CNHA, which is the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement. Yes. Can we have somebody from them on your show? Richard, right? Yes. Richard Matheros is our coordinator for the NHPI Complete Count Committee. And it's been such a wonderful job, you know, working with our organizations in the community to inform them and also to educate them. We even hosted some education outreach that is done in, you know, people's native language. Like for our Samoan community, if we have to relay the message of the census message to our leaders, we have to, you know, use Samoan language. What about now the people that are still in, not the ones in Hawaii, but the Samoan population in Samoa? What about them? Do you have special people that go to Samoa to do the work? That's a very good question, Marsha, because it brings us to an issue that the Census Bureau have come around with in terms of working with our community. We, you know, through our community outreach, our census engagement activities, working with the food distribution and some of the partners in our community organizations, we realize that there are a lot of our stranded residents from outer, from, you know, islands of the Pacific. They are stranded here in the state of Hawaii, some in the mainland. What do you mean stranded? When COVID happened, you know, the borders of the islands have been closed. Yes. So we are trying to help some of the residents in terms of assisting them with their questions and even, you know, their concerns of not being counted. So we are able to connect with the coordinators from the census coordinator in the state, in the U.S. territory of American Samoa. Jason Goff is the coordinator there. And he's working collaboratively with our leaders here, as well as our regional office, to communicate the message to our residents that are here since borders are closed in the islands due to COVID-19. So they are able to be counted. So one of the things that they had mentioned is for American Samoa census, they have to do it face to face. It's all paper-based. So it's a great idea that they share and communicate it with our leaders so that we can assist our residents here, our people that are here in Hawaii. So they've seen the commercials. They are, you know, they've seen the signs and everywhere at the stores and even banners. And they asked the questions. So it's a good thing that they know census is important. And they want to be counted. So I just received the, you know, the estimate number of Marshallese that are stuck here in the state of Hawaii, which is over 200. And even out in, you know, and there's more about 100 out in other states outside of Hawaii. So with the American Samoa, through our community outreach with food distribution, helping the community through food distribution, they were able, we were able to work with a group of American Samoans under the Two Fatasi Alliance for American Samoan Community. This organization was established because of all the people that were stuck here due to COVID. And they, you know, were able to send us, you know, information that there's over a thousand of community members that are, you know, stranded in terms of because of moving, not able to go home because of the borders are closed. Yeah. Well, what do we do as the Census Bureau? You know, when they ask the question, when they inquire about how to respond, we have that communication with our coordinator in American Samoa territory, ensuring that we are counting our population, but the ones in the U.S. territory that are here in the state of Hawaii and outside of the Navy. Now, tell me the seven territories. We have 50 states plus seven territories. What are the territories? We have Guam. We have American Samoa as another territory. Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Northern Marianas, and do I have it all? D.C., District of Columbia, District of Columbia. That's six. I have one more. Have one more. Samoa, American Samoa. Yeah, we counted American Samoa. American Samoa. Okay. Yes. Yeah. I'm looking at a truncated map of the Pacific. And all of these islands, Commonwealth of Northern Marianas, Republic of Bilal, Federated States of Micronesia, Republic of the Marshall Islands, Republic of Kiribati, Republic of Nauru. And that is 50,000 islands. My god. And so not all of them are territories, right? Yes. Okay. Okay. Now, let's talk about, we've got every, oh, the one community we didn't talk about, and that is Chattatou. I know Robert has been on several times, and he's really working on it. Do you know how, and he made, you know, anything about how that's going? Actually, yes. Robert has been so amazing. We're so happy that he's a part of our team. And so he can speak to our Chinese community members. And I always look at our census tracts, and these census tracts are doing well. Chinatown is doing well. Some of our areas in Waikiki, where there are a lot of vacant units are a little bit problematic because, again, the vacant units, nobody can respond. So it doesn't, you know, it affects our initial self-response right now. But I am really happy to say that our census tracts in those areas in Chinatown, except for one or two, are actually doing well. It's actually the areas in Waikiki that we have a lot of census tracts that are not responding very well. But now how are we doing overall for your territory? So overall in the state of Hawaii, we have a self-response rate of 62.4 percent. And then we have a door-to-door, we are also measuring our door-to-door enumeration rate right now. This is the non-response follow-up where our enumerators are doing the really important and, you know, hard job right now of going and knocking on doors of every household who hasn't responded yet. And that is 36.2 percent. So if we combine our self-response rates and our door-to-door enumeration rates, we have a total combined as of yesterday, 98.6 percent of households are already enumerated in Hawaii. Yes, so we are in our last push. Elizabeth has been all over the island, spending our banners. Everyone, Jesus has been working with the Spanish community and of course our Robert with the Chinatown community, Chinese community, and with our lawmakers as well. So everyone is like in the last push of the census as well. So and shout out to Sharon, our Chinese community. So yeah, every and Tim over at the big island is always out every day because he's able to do all the questionnaire assistance. So we are just, you know, in our last phase and thank you to all our partners who have journeyed with us through this whole census journey. Yeah, we only have a minute left. Well, yeah, thank you. Miss Marcia, thank you so much. Real quick, tell us now that you collect all of this stuff, where does it go and what happens and we only have a minute. So tell us once you collected, you have collected all this then what? So, you know, it goes in our security systems. It's going to be reviewed for completeness and accuracy. And it's going to be processed and we will submit the portion that counts after it's done. Okay. Then it goes to the president. The president. And that's the next step after the processing of the data. Yeah. Okay. Well, again, it's been a pleasure spending this year with you. And I hope this isn't our last time. I hope you don't shut down before we get to do this again. But again, thank you both. It's been a pleasure spending the year with you. And we'll look forward to seeing you again. Thank you so much, Miss Marcia. I'm honored. Thank you.