The city of Tulsa's director of community partnerships said Friday that diversity has been crucial to efforts to geting residents counted in the lead-up to the Sept. 30 deadline.
"We've been doing everything we can to get the count up throughout the Tulsa metro area," said Kyle Ofori, during a Friday meeting with the state's Complete Count Committee which he attended virtually. The director of the U.S. Census Bureau, Steven Dillingham, attended the meeting in person during a visit to Oklahoma on a tour of states as the deadline approaches.
"What that's meant from starting our work back in July is really building the most diverse team that we can to be present at either in-person events or doing communication through social media or, in these last few days especially, tagging along with outdoor, socially distanced events, particularly at apartment complexes in census tracts that have low response rates," Ofori said.
"We know that people have different sources of information they trust, different groups of people they trust, different ways they communicate," Ofori said, "and that we need to be able to work with people from all these backgrounds and all these levels of interest in the census to make sure that everyone gets counted."
Dillingham said Friday that Oklahoma ranked behind the national average of 94.1% of the count completed, with a rate of 92.1%. The Associated Press reports that, according to the state, Oklahoma ranks 41st out of the 50 states for its census response rate.
