Seven nonprofit leaders in Denver are among the more than 500 nationwide who are asking the U.S. Census Bureau to refrain from cutting short its data collecting operation by one month, as the bureau’s director announced it would earlier this week.

“Collectively, many of our institutions have invested more than $100 million in rural and urban communities across the country in support of the Census Bureau’s efforts to educate and persuade households about the importance of participating in the 2020 Census,” reads the letter dated Aug. 5 to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur L. Ross and Census Bureau head Steven Dillingham. 

“With nearly four out of ten households still to be counted, many of us have deepened our engagement and made additional grants to organizations in support of outreach plans that rely on the Bureau’s announced October 31 end date for field operations,” the letter continued.

Among the signatories were Merle C. Chambers, founder of the Chambers Initiative in Denver; Kyle Rojas Legleiter, senior director of public policy at the Colorado Health Foundation in Denver; Tatiana Hernandez, CEO of the Community Foundation Boulder County in Boulder; Carlos Martinez, president and CEO of the Latino Community Foundation of Colorado in Denver; Joanne Kelley, CEO of Philanthropy Colorado in Denver; Lindy Eichenbaum Lent, president and CEO of the Rose Community Foundation in Denver; and Javier Alberto Soto, president and CEO of The Denver Foundation in Denver.

Originally, the deadline for collecting responses, including self-responses and door knocking by census takers, was Aug. 15. The bureau changed the data to Oct. 31 to accommodate pandemic operations. 

However, on Aug. 3, Dillingham announced, “We will end field data collection by September 30, 2020.” Vox reports that census response rates are lagging behind the 2010 response in the vast majority of the country, in some places by more than 10 percentage points. Census response determines legislative representation nationally and locally for the next decade.

“Rushing the census would unnecessarily impair our nation’s collective efforts to achieve a fair and accurate 2020 Census,” the leaders added in their letter. “It would hurt a diverse range of rural and urban communities, leaving them underrepresented locally and in Congress and cutting their fair share of federal funding for Medicaid, economic development, child care, schools, road and public transit improvements, home heating assistance for senior citizens, and many more vital services.”