Tag: long beach

A Controversial Census Is Fast Approaching. One Small City Thinks It Has the Answer

Posted on by robbie

As the 2020 census approaches, Long Beach, California, is preparing for a complicated counting process: a first-ever online questionnaire, an already contentious political environment, and a pending question about citizenship that could adversely impact participation from immigrants and undocumented people, groups that historically are already less responsive.  
The city boasts a diverse population — more than 47 percent of residents speak a non-English language and about 13 percent are not citizens — and city leaders want to take steps to ensure every resident is counted in 2020. To oversee these efforts, last fall the city brought on FUSE executive fellow Salem Afeworki. “Some people just don’t trust government agencies given the political environment we’re in now,” Afeworki said. “And some people don’t want to fill out their personal information online because they’re not sure how the data will be used. We have to find ways to help people feel comfortable and safe about participating.”
Getting an accurate count is critical for the city, said Kevin Jackson, deputy city manager of Long Beach. Census figures determine a state’s number of seats in the House of Representatives and can have an impact on receiving as much as $675 billion in federal grants each year. “There are many population-based grants that relate to transportation, health and human services, community development and other activities,” Jackson said. “If the count is inaccurate, we could lose funding.”
Indeed, this was a problem for California, which lost federal funds after the 2010 census. In response, the state has invested $100 million, with another $54 million proposed as part of the 2019-2020 governor’s budget, to educate and convince California residents to complete 2020 census questionnaires.

Bring the Community in Early

For many urban areas like Long Beach, the census process begins two years before those forms are distributed, when the Local Update of Census Addresses (LUCA) is conducted to confirm residential addresses. These are then shared with the Census Bureau, which uses the addresses to contact residents. “The tricky part is that there are people who live in garages, or in their cars in parking lots, or in other types of unconventional housing,” Afeworki said.
People experiencing homelessness are one of the harder-to-count groups that the census can miss. Another is renters, who sometimes think — mistakenly — that the building’s owner is the only one who should be counted. Also included are children under age 5, low-income residents, people who don’t speak English and people with disabilities. Additionally, residents with noncitizen status, such as immigrants and undocumented people, are often undercounted.
Long Beach has a population of roughly 475,000 and is part of Los Angeles County, considered the hardest-to-count county in the United States. Long Beach has the second highest population of hard-to-count residents in the County (5.9 percent), with the City of Los Angeles ranking first (50.59 percent), Afeworki explained. To help identify as many people as possible for the LUCA process, Long Beach hired community organizations familiar with neighborhoods and its residents.
Now the city is focusing on the next phase of census preparation, which includes developing a strategic action plan, messaging and testing to determine the best ways to communicate with hard-to-count groups. Afeworki has been studying past census efforts in other cities for ideas on improving and enhancing the process in Long Beach. For example, the City of Los Angeles is currently designing a Goodwill Ambassador’s Program, which recruits volunteers with diverse backgrounds to aid census canvassing and educational efforts. Los Angeles is exploring ways to involve members of the hard-to-count community as volunteers, an idea that could be equally useful in Long Beach. “They can serve as trusted messengers and provide non-English language assistance,” Afeworki said.
She has also been meeting with a variety of stakeholders and this spring plans to launch the Long Beach Complete Count Committee, a coalition of local government officials and community organizations, such as NALEO, which is devoted to mobilizing the Latino community to participate in the census. The goal is for committee members to collaboratively create community engagement practices specific to Long Beach, mobilize resources and share ideas about how to convince people that completing the census will be safe and beneficial to them and their communities. For example, Afeworki believes that it will be important to provide up-to-date and accurate information on data security and privacy, especially for undocumented and immigrant groups.

Long Beach Census
Long Beach wants to ensure that every resident is counted in the upcoming 2020 Census count.

In previous stakeholder meetings, Afeworki learned that schools and healthcare facilities tend to be trusted in communities, so she’s working to engage these establishments as well. Libraries can play a role in educating residents about what the community would gain if they complete the census, too. Also, Long Beach has worked for several years to build its in-house translation and interpretation services in Spanish, Tagalog and Khmer (the most common, non-English languages in the city), and Afeworki expects to draw on that expertise to address language barriers as the census begins.

The Challenges of Going Digital

Perhaps the biggest change to the upcoming census is that it will be largely conducted online, a move motivated in part by federal budget restrictions. For Long Beach residents who don’t speak English, providing a form in their native language should be more easily facilitated with the digital format, noted Afeworki. However, the challenge becomes reaching people without digital access, whether that is no computer or smartphone, or a limited data plan or no home wifi. In response, Los Angeles County and Long Beach are working to establish Census Action Kiosks around the city that residents can use to fill out census questionnaires. Most kiosks will use existing computers located at public facilities such as libraries, job centers and community organizations.
The Census Bureau also announced that due to budget cuts it will hire fewer “enumerators,” or census takers, the people who are sent out if a person at a given address fails to respond after three contacts. As such, there won’t be as many federal employees to visit nonresponders and help them complete their forms. “That means local government has to play a big role in filling that gap,” Afeworki said.
Long Beach plans to leverage its resources with state funding to mobilize a local complete count committee and work with community-based organizations and other members of the community to address any outreach gaps. A personal connection is important, given that “the government doesn’t tend to be the most trusted messenger to these communities,” Jackson said. Many people also worry about how their data will be used. So outreach employees will be trained to talk about data security with residents, ensuring them that their information is not shared outside of the census and used solely for its purposes.
If the proposed question about citizenship status is included in the upcoming census, engaging the community to gain trust will become even more vital, noted Jackson. States with large immigrant populations, including California, sued to have the question removed from the census, as critics said it will dissuade immigrants and others from participating. The Supreme Court is currently weighing the issue and is expected to decide this spring if the question can be included in 2020.
“We’re trying to plan for that and make sure that we have trusted messengers out in the community helping people understand that they’re not at risk, and that it’s actually essential that they participate,” Jackson said. “I can’t predict what’s going to happen, but we’re hopeful that with all the planning and engaging the community, we’re going to be successful.”  
Afeworki said she now sees the census efforts as similar to those for an election — mobilizing residents to act, whether to vote or fill out a form, in a specific time frame. Collaboration on many levels, she noted, will be key. “Honestly, the census is harder than an election,” Afeworki said. “At least in an election, you’re typically targeting U.S. citizens above a certain age. With a census, a baby who was born yesterday needs to be counted. All residents are counted, and there’s no one agency or entity that can do this alone and be successful.”
Erin O’Donnell is a freelance writer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
This story was produced by FUSE Corps, a national executive fellowship program that partners with local government agencies and produces solutions-driven journalism.

For Soldiers Enduring Seemingly Endless Recoveries, This Organization Provides Free Beach Vacations

Posted on by robbie

With a giant crowd lining the street, fire companies saluting and bagpipes blaring, you’d think it was July 4th or Memorial Day. But the cause for celebration on this balmy July Sunday wasn’t a national holiday. It was to honor the wounded U.S. soldiers and their families who were being treated to an all-expenses-paid vacation to Long Beach, N.Y., courtesy of the Long Beach Waterfront Warriors (LBWW).
Amid all the bad publicity surrounding scheduling discrepancies at VA hospitals nationwide and the plight of our returning troops in general, there’s another issue that’s seldom mentioned: the hardships borne by injured service members who require long-term hospital care.
Soldiers with debilitating injuries — both mental and physical—may never receive the warm hometown welcome depicted in car commercials. Instead, they go to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., to receive treatment and rehabilitation until their doctors classify them as non-medical assist (meaning they no longer need to be at the hospital or require doctors and nurses to be nearby day to day). Depending upon the extent of their injuries, some soldiers are stuck at the hospital for indefinite periods of time.
So in 2009, John McLoughlin, a retired New York City fireman, decided to do something special for those service members by founding the Long Beach Waterfront Warriors. He modeled LBWW on The Graybeards, a civic organization in the Rockaways, N.Y., that runs an adaptive sports festival for the disabled. McLoughlin took this idea a step further, extending it to a weeklong summer vacation and paying for the entire trip and accommodations, as well as providing specialized activities.
This past summer, LBWW flew in 22 injured vets and 46 of their family members to the seashore community.
A few days after the parade, Luke, a Marine from the Midwest who had both legs amputated above the knees after sustaining catastrophic blast wounds in Afghanistan, sits on the beach with his parents and kid sister and talks about the more than 50 surgeries he’s endured in the past two and a half years.
“I was hoping to have my prosthetics for this [week], but…” Luke says with a shrug, referring to the never-ending succession of infections that snag his rehab and timeline for leaving the hospital. Through the Wounded Warrior Project, Luke is one of eight vets in a cyber security training program that upon completion should land him a job with NASA.
Luke’s wife and two kids are also with him in Long Beach (staying at the Allegria Hotel, which has partnered with LBWW for years), where he’s actually able to spend a rare week living with them. That’s because, while his family is able to live in on-base housing, he and the other inpatients on medical-hold stay in barracks on Walter Reed’s campus.
He doesn’t dwell on the subject and instead smiles, recalling the fishing charter he went on that morning. “It was rough out there,” he says. “We were like five miles out, and I got a little nervous for a minute in my wheelchair.” Luke caught the boat’s only keeper of the day, a 24-incher.
Luke and another double-amputee, Jose, are able to participate in perhaps LBWW’s most unlikely activity: surfing lessons. A team of instructors shows up in the early afternoon with boards specially designed to accommodate surfers with disabilities. Both are catching waves in no time.
Jose was enjoying the LBWW vacation with his wife and brother. He also lives at Walter Reed, and his family is burdened by the same circumstances as Luke’s. Fortunately, however, Homes for Our Troops, a nonprofit that builds specially designed housing for disabled vets, recently broke ground on a new house for Jose and his wife on Long Island, not far from his family in Queens.
Historically, LBWW tries to help the most severely injured and those that have recently returned from deployment overseas. In fact, sometimes the families are being reunited for the first time. But as the role of the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan has wound down, the organization has also reached out to vets who’ve been in the hospital for an extended period of time — years or even decades.

Veterans and their families enjoy the beach at a LBWW event, July 29, 2014.

Also lounging on the beach that day are 42 Vietnam veterans from the local Northport VA Medical Center. Most are afflicted with some combination of mental and physical illnesses. Ned, a potbellied volunteer with long gray hair and beard, nods to Ralph, a barrel-chested vet with no toes, and explains how much this day means to Ralph. “When he got up this morning, there was a big ‘0’ on the wall in his room. Tomorrow it’ll say ‘365.’ He counts down the days until we come out again next year.”
Just then, four teenage volunteer boys and Jerry, a retired fireman and boisterous volunteer with LBWW since its inception, lift Ralph into a specially designed beach wheelchair and roll him on the sand and into the surf, 10 hands securely on the handles as he bobs and smiles through the waves during his second dip of the afternoon.
The severity of Northport Vets’ disabilities made day trips a huge challenge for the VA’s staff. But with the enthusiasm and organization that LBWW has built over the years, it’s now safe and practical for the group to bring the Vietnam vets out as well. LBWW keeps a team of volunteer nurses from Long Island’s North Shore University Hospital on hand at all times during the week’s activities, led by Nurse Patty, a mainstay with the group.
Jerry explains that LBWW’s success is reliant on its relatively small size, and that repeating their model is best done at the local level. He says that large programs like the “Wounded Warriors Project have great resources” that can help LBWW get off the ground, “but they also have a huge infrastructure, which creates a lot of overhead.” With LBWW’s web of tight, local functionaries, every dollar raised goes directly to their cause. Aside from the considerable cost of plane tickets and accommodations, LBWW has also raised funds for a private tour of Ground Zero and Rockefeller Center, the weekend parade and BBQ, a 5K race, a Mets game and the fishing trip, not to mention three beach days packed with food, drinks, surfing and even a massage tent.
LBWW’s success has already inspired another group, the West Palm Beach Waterfront Warriors, who’ve been bringing wounded vets and their families to the Florida coast since 2011.
Which shorefront community will be next?

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The names and identifying information of the veterans in this story have been changed to protect their privacy.