Photo by Rajiv Perera on Unsplash
The 2030 Census is the most foundational tool we have as Americans to protect civil rights, ensure accurate representation, and secure the equitable allocation of resources that children and families need to thrive. The Census is not a singular event, but a 10-year organizing opportunity. With 1,301 days remaining until Census Day 2030, the time is now for child advocates to jump in, building trust, infrastructure, and community engagement for a complete count.
Child advocates have taken a hard look at both the successes and the failures of the 2020 Census to build the infrastructure for a complete 2030 Census count. This blog focuses on census activities in three states: Arkansas, Kentucky, and New Jersey.
Thank you to Count All Kids and Census Roadmap for sharing the resources cited in this blog during recent webinars for child advocates.
Arkansas recently became the first state in the nation to establish a 2030 Complete Count Committee. This is a success story built on some hard lessons from 2020. Arkansas experienced the biggest census undercount in the nation in 2020, after failing to form a statewide Complete Count Committee until 2019. The miscount cost the state as much as $1 billion annually in federal funds, meaning a decade of missed support for the infrastructure and programs that children and families rely on for education, health care, voting rights, and much more.
Rebecca Zimmermann at Arkansas Advocates for Children & Families shared that this hard lesson translated into widespread motivation to get moving for 2030. Arkansas Advocates for Children & Families worked with a wide range of allies, including the state’s Chamber of Commerce, to advance legislation in the 2025 session, which passed with only one opposing vote.
Advocates in Kentucky learned the hard way that broad, one-size-fits-all strategies just don’t work. Karena Cash of Kentucky Youth Advocates (KYA) highlighted that Kentucky’s undercount of young children showed up in urban areas, in rural, remote areas, among immigrant families, and across every type of community in the state.
In response, KYA began a census partnership with La Casita Center, the largest Latinx-led nonprofit in the state of Kentucky, to ensure that 2030 Census outreach efforts are built by the people and community organizations that families know and trust. Eva Melissa Astudillo Sotelo and Amal Hassan of La Casita Center shared some of the core strategies they are using to ensure a complete count in Louisville in 2030, particularly in the Latinx community, which was significantly undercounted in 2020.
Recognizing that trust takes time to build, La Casita Center is investing in a 5-year, year-round engagement plan. Rather than leading with marketing, La Casita dedicated years to focus groups, one-on-one interviews, and engaging diverse stakeholders to understand community fears, motivations, and specific needs. That deep listening was essential to making outreach plans and creating campaign materials.
Amal Hassan of La Casita Center outlined the essential role that youth play in bringing information to families. In many immigrant and multi-generational households, youth act as bridges for information, helping to relay census education to families in a way that builds trust from the inside out. La Casita Center built an outreach and communication strategy based on listening to Latinx youth voices and collaborating with youth as key messengers.
Lisa Bernstein of Simply Put highlighted the tremendous impact that an accurate Census count in 2020 has had on the city of Paterson, New Jersey. Working through early childhood educators, other service providers, and civil servants focused on families with young children, advocates leveraged the We Count! book and curriculum to connect with Paterson families in fifteen different languages.
The goal of this intensive “trusted advisor” program was to answer people’s questions about privacy, census procedures, and how census data connects to tangible community resources like school capacity and hospital beds. The We Count! project partnered with early childhood educators, librarians, and community outreach staff who were already trusted by families, training these advisors to use the educational materials to help families navigate census questions.
The We Count! approach was rooted in early childhood education principles. The engaging curriculum and tools, such as book walks and activity kits, allowed educators to interact with families in non-traditional settings like food pantries and libraries.
The resulting 9.3% increase in Paterson’s population pushed the city past the threshold to be recognized as a First-Class City, increasing the city’s authority to control its own budget priorities, and unlocking significant new state and federal funding resources that will directly benefit families with young children.
Many child advocacy organizations are deeply rooted in local communities; others work with large networks of local community organizations that are already trusted local advisors and will be essential messengers during the 2030 Census. Census fundraising, outreach, and messaging should be woven into the year-round trust-building work that child advocates are already doing every day. Learning from both the successes and the failures of 2020, advocates can leverage resources like Count All Kids, Census Roadmap, and We Count! to start building now for a complete count in 2030.
Many thanks to Rebecca Zimmermann at Arkansas Advocates for Children & Families, Karena Cash of Kentucky Youth Advocates, Eva Melissa Astudillo Sotelo and Amal Hassan of La Casita Center, and Lisa Bernstein of Simply Put for generously sharing their expertise and insights for this blog.
