Silicon Valley Community Foundation

NextGen Policy partnered with the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF) to encourage philanthropic, business and community leaders across the state to invest in an accurate 2020 Census count. The SVCF organized a series of workshops and provided resources, and technical support to help community foundations and other partners develop funding strategies to ensure the hardest-to-reach populations were counted.

In the Bay Area, for example, this initiative spurred close collaboration among foundations and resulted in increased funding for census outreach. The Bay Area Census Funders Collaborative (BACFC) worked closely together to contribute towards pool funds, create one common census application, and utilize one portal (hosted by SVCF) to receive applications from nonprofit organizations. The Bay Area’s Census self-response rate was 75.7%, more than 6 percentage points higher than the state rate and almost 9 percentage points higher than the national rate.