It was the egg nog that convinced me Lynn City Clerk Janet L. Rowe was the right person to handle perhaps the toughest assignment any municipal official could tackle in this insane year.
Rowe and her dedicated City Hall staff set out coffee, treats and egg nog at last December’s census introduction meeting in the City Council Chamber.
With a smile on her face, a few jokes up her sleeve, and a holiday treat at the ready, Rowe set the tone for a “can-do” approach to organizing and rolling out a citywide campaign to get residents to fill out census forms.
She didn’t mince words in debunking Lynn’s current population estimate for the city and state officials, local organization representatives and residents assembled in the Chamber.
Rowe called the 90,329 population tally for the city well below the actual number. With that declaration, she threw down the gauntlet and committed herself, her staff and, by extension, the city as a whole to getting an accurate count.
The census is mandated in the United States Constitution. It takes place every 10 years which means getting it right when the count rolls around is vital, especially to poor cities like Lynn.
She reminded her City Hall audience that for each person not counted, communities miss out on $2,400 in federal funding – a tough blow for low-income urban communities like Lynn.
Sometimes the by-the-book approach to getting things done in the public sectors sidelines a lot of people who offer valuable resources. In launching Lynn’s census campaign, Rowe tossed the book out the window and drew a big happy circle around local social service organizations, churches, immigrant assistance groups and anyone and everyone else who could help accomplish an accurate census count.
She updated campaign participants with frequent emails and she didn’t panic when COVID-19 hit in March and made the census takers’ jobs exponentially tougher.
Lynn’s census response rate was approximately 44 percent in the spring, compared to the state-wide response at that time of 61 percent.
With a smile on her face and steel in her spine, Rowe met the pandemic head on. She mobilized kids to help get the word out about the census. She blitzed the city with census reminder signs and, by June, the city’s response rate was 55.8 percent. Even as the city publicized the census’ importance, organizations reached out to get local immigrant and refugee residents to fill out the census. That work meant overcoming language barriers and fears about providing household information to a census taker.
In August, census workers reached out to “hard-to-count” residents with city youth workers dropping brochures printed in 15 languages. Rowe led the census charge and never faltered even as early and mail-in voting presented challenges for her staff on top of the census count.
She constantly kept organizations updated about the confusing high court deliberations surrounding the deadline for census taking. When Oct. 16 materialized as the final day, Rowe urged people to keep counting and push to the finish line.
Lynn ended up with a 64.3 percent response rate in the 2020 census compared to 61.9 percent in 2010. Door-to-door census taking will boost 2020 participation even higher. Great job, Janet, and congratulations to everyone involved in getting Lynn counted.
