The Colorado Health Foundation (“CHF” or “the Foundation”) is a statewide, nonprofit and nonpartisan philanthropic organization with a mission to improve the health and well-being of Coloradans. Through community engagement, research, grantmaking, and private sector investments, the Foundation aims to ensure that everyone in Colorado has what they need to be healthy.
The Foundation strongly opposes the proposed changes to the decennial census because they would undermine the completeness of the population count and reduce public access to critical demographic data. Accurate, comprehensive, and publicly available census data are essential to advancing health and health equity. Census data allow communities, public agencies, researchers, philanthropic organizations, and other institutions to understand who lives in a community, identify disparities, assess community needs, and make informed decisions about programs, services, policies, and distribution of resources. The
proposed rule would weaken this critical data infrastructure by changing who is included in the population used for congressional apportionment and restricting the demographic information the Census Bureau may collect through the decennial census. The Foundation respectfully urges the Census Bureau to withdraw these proposed changes and retain the longstanding residence-based approach to apportionment and the collection of race and ethnicity data through the decennial census, while preserving the Bureau’s ability to evaluate and consider additional demographic questions in the future.