The Michigan Nonprofits Count Campaign has provided new tools and digital content on the importance of the 2020 census and ways that local organizations can help educate, engage and empower their communities around census issues.

The campaign is an effort to mobilize nonprofits and partner with state and local government to encourage participation in the census. It is spearheaded by the Michigan Nonprofit Association (MNA) with seed funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and support from CMF.

The campaign's newly launched website "Be Counted Michigan 2020" features downloadable resources, details on how interested groups can get involved and information on the impact of an inaccurate census. 

As CMF has reported, our state stands to lose $1,800 in federal funding per year for every person who isn’t counted, funding that supports critical services, including education, employment, veteran services, rural development, health care and nearly every other major issue supported by Michigan philanthropy.

"An inaccurate 2020 census can lead to more than a decade of underrepresentation and underinvestment in communities that have been historically undercounted," said Donna Murray-Brown, president and CEO, MNA. "Without government funding, communities would turn to philanthropy and nonprofits to fill the void, but philanthropy does not have the resources to replace lost government support. And, ensuring hard-to-count communities’ participation in the census requires additional resources and expertise."

A critical component of the campaign is to ensure that MNA’s statewide expertise providing communications, research, capacity building training, campaign tracking/reporting and advocacy gets to the grassroots, community-based organizations throughout the state. That connection is being achieved through the creation of regional census hubs. The census hubs will be the link between MNA and organizations in each hub's region as specific plans are developed to reach hard-to-count populations. They will also provide mini grants to organizations closest to those at risk of under-count. As community foundations are trusted community leaders and partners, their insights have been essential in determining the census hub administrator in each region. In several regions, the community foundation or a consortium of community foundations emerged as the ideal census hub administrator, leveraging their deep work in community leadership and grantmaking capacity. In other regions, the community foundations and colleague CMF members counseled to select the local United Way or Nonprofit Capacity Building Center as the hub. 

A three-year campaign budget of $4.7 million has been established to implement the campaign statewide in hard-to-count areas of Michigan. A number of CMF members in addition to the W.K. Kellogg Foundation have confirmed grant support to MNA and several more are in process. It is anticipated that MNA will announce the leadership funders in the next month. Grant funding will support state and local research, communications and local capacity-building education for nonprofits.

The partnerships created in these efforts have been recognized nationally as a groundbreaking practice in civic engagement. CMF staff have joined with MNA in representing Michigan in panels, webinars and conversations across the country as others look to our state for guidance to create similar collaborations in their regions.

Want more?

Visit the new Michigan Nonprofits Complete Count Campaign website.

Sign up for the "Be Counted MI 2020" newsletter.

Visit CMF's Census 2020 webpage.