ONE Northside is a partner in the 2020 Illinois Census Project, an effort of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR). The goal is to engage our base living in Rogers Park and Uptown so that people who normally ignore the Census know this time around what is urgently at stake if they ignore it.
If those of us using LINK or housing vouchers don’t complete the Census, then LINK and our housing programs will get less money to pass on to us — all because on paper, we won’t exist.
If those of us in Rogers Park and Uptown don’t complete the Census, then next year, in 2021, we could lose our congressional districts to gerrymandering. We could lose our power to push our congressperson to vote YES on rent control and a Green New Deal.
If those of us who are undocumented don’t complete the Census, then we become even more invisible. We let our opponents trick us into thinking ICE and the Census Bureau work together. We may lose the few champions in Congress we now have who fight to abolish ICE.
ONE Northside and ICIRR are promoting the Census not only because it protects the funding of crucial social programs and the political power of immigrant, working-class neighborhoods; it is also because it gives us a chance to recruit and train new leaders — one-on-one at the doorstep and over the phones — for our issue campaigns. We are hiring a team of part-time Census Outreach Workers to doorknock, phonebank, and educate Rogers Park and Uptown residents between now and April 30. If interested, call Eugene Lim at 773.993.8308.