How Do We Count People?  How Do People Count?

In the second listening session for the WIN Measures Update, researchers, community leaders, and measurement practitioners grappled with the demographics of health, well-being and equity.

Peter Eckart, Senior Fellow at WE in the World and Aliaa Eldabli, Social Transformation Intern at WE in the World

Earlier this month, the WIN Network hosted the second in a series of listening sessions designed to update the WIN measures from the perspectives of racial justice and intergenerational well-being.  The WIN measures were originally developed in 2019 by over 100 organizations and communities working together across sectors to identify and try out measures that mattered to them. Just two years later, calls for justice and transformational change have encouraged us to review the measures again. By understanding and measuring how racial justice and injustice affect individuals and communities across all ages, we can advocate for new ways to achieve opportunities for all people, especially our most vulnerable populations. 

“How can we ensure that we capture nuances in demographic data that may be relevant to understanding health outcomes, which are lost with broad categories of race/ethnicity [and different age groups]”? - WIN Measures Update participant

The focus of the June 17 session was on demographics, which describe “different qualities, real or socially constructed, of people and places. They help us to understand population patterns based on groupings of people by a common characteristic.”  The current WIN measures for demographics include standard metrics like race and ethnicity, median age, and level of education.  Also included is a measure of the “population who do not speak English well,” which we now recognize as reflecting a deficit lens, and is an example of the kind of opportunity that these listening sessions have to make the WIN measures more inclusive, asset-based, and justice-oriented.

The session was a nice balance of expertise by both training and lived experience, with lots of opportunity to discuss the current and aspiration state of demographics measurement.  Mark Hugo Lopez from the Pew Research Center spoke on the changing ethnic makeup of the US population and about the powerful way that migrant communities have fueled the growth of the American economy.

“The US has more immigrants than any other country in the world; about 20% of all people who live outside of their countries of birth live in the US… a growing share of the US  population is foreign-born, but additionally there is a growing share of people who are US born children of immigrant parents, and together, those two populations are going to account for over one-third of the US population in the coming decades--right now they are about a quarter of the US population… so a significant number of Americans have very close connections to their immigrant groups and immigrant stories and that may have implications for how they identify in terms of race and ethnicity, change across generations.”

Kerith Conron from The Williams Institute presented by video on the intersection of race, sex, sexual orientation and gender expression, and how those measurements inform our understanding of the social determinants of queer health. 

“The percentage of the population that self-identifies as LGBT is growing over time. These increases are being driven largely by young people, high school age folks and young adults ages 18 to about under 25. About 40% of LGBT adults are people of color, about 60% are White, but when we look at youth, we see that about 50% are White, and 50% are young people of color. So we have to think about equity along multiple aspects of identity and intersecting axes of inequality… and we need to get SOGI [sexual orientation, gender identity] questions on big surveys like the Census. Why? Because they are the primary vehicles for knowledge on employment and economic status, wages, wealth, and debt.”

Gerald Boyd from chromatic.black concluded the presentations with his life story of navigating systemic racism, reenforcing the importance of addressing intersectionality in demographics with his overlapping experiences, and closing with a sobering observation that many of the same obstacles black youth face today are the same as he had to overcome fifty years previously.

“I came [on the Eastern Shore of Virginia] as a migrant worker in 1950 … with no running water or indoor plumbing, and until the 1960s, we lived without electricity in this half enslaved condition ... until I moved back to my hometown in Mobile, Alabama, where I became involved in the then Civil Rights Movement as the coordinator of high school and college-age students who were assigned the task of desegregating the public facilities in Mobile, Alabama.  … My wife and I moved on to San Francisco, where I join[ed] a team to implement a desegregation program, the first multicultural department in California. Work there included reducing the failing grades of minority students -- 51% in the first quarter.  … After getting my master’s in transpersonal psychology, I started working with people who were homeless, with veterans, and people who were addicted to drugs… that is the work I continue to do on the shore.”

About half of the meeting was focused on conversations between the speakers and the session participants. Fifty strong voices wrestled with the ways that we count people in our country and how communities desire to be understood in all of their diversity and nuance.  In addition to the robust exchanges in the meeting chat, we all contributed to a shared document addressing the demographic measures most relevant for policy change, the opportunity for applying an intersectional lens to demographics, and how to make data collection more inclusive and equitable.  

Just a few of the comments:

• What we track is a reflection of what we value

• Have to tackle demographic information in the community. There has to be context and the stories that go along with it.

• [We need to embrace] Universal design - across generations / ages, and inclusive to all races & ethnicities

• Gender identity - going beyond cisgender male and female

• How can we ensure that we capture nuances in demographic data that may be relevant to understanding health outcomes, which are lost with broad categories of race/ethnicity?

• Considering measures related to intersectionality, how can we avoid tokenism?

• What is new data we can create, or structures can create that are more equitable? And what are datasets we know and have come to rely on? Hard time seeing what could be different?

• [We must be concerned with] Data sovereignty - not blocked by data-keepers at a university.  What gets collected in the first place? - community-driven autonomy

Wish you’d been able to participate?  You still can.  The recording is available here, and you can glance through the slides here.  Most importantly, you can see what others said about measures for demographics and contribute your own opinions and experiences here. We are … ahem … counting on you.

The next two listening sessions will address Food & Agriculture and Community Vitality. Please register to join us and add your voice to this important national conversation on equity. If you’d like to suggest a speaker for either of these sessions, please contact Kristen Rego today.