In 2020, Hester Street worked with a coalition of hundreds of community groups, advocates, service providers, representatives from labor and major civic institutions, and City agencies to mobilize to get New Yorkers counted in the Census and then registered to vote.
Built on the understanding that local community-based organizations — which serve New Yorkers in the communities where they live and in the languages that they speak — are the most trusted messengers of important and sensitive information, the Complete Count effort for the Census was designed to resource and train organizations to build awareness about the Census, convey its importance, and mobilize a full count within the City’s hard-to-reach populations and communities.
For its part, HST worked closely with Complete Count partners – particularly the United Way of NY, NY Immigrant Coalition, the NYC Census 2020 office and Robin Hood – to plan, strategize and develop innovative tools combined with tailored technical assistance and stakeholder engagement to support Complete Count efforts citywide.
Based on feedback and data from community-based and government agency partners, HST created the NYC Census asset map, an interactive mapping tool that allows users to view layered data according to NYC Council District, including neighborhood demographics, language preference, economic data, and community assets. Once the Complete Count campaign was complete, HST leveraged the dataset created for the Census map to build the NYC Get Out the Vote map, adding data on voter registration, voter age, and polling locations to the existing data for each Council District.
2020 Census Tools:
To support community-based partners in accessing and using the data found in the Census mapping tool, HST created this user guide and lists of community assets broken out by Census Districts.
In order to reach historically undercounted populations for the 2020 Census, HST developed culturally specific outreach materials for community-based partners, including this toolkit for reaching Black New Yorkers.