2023 Census at the City Mission
On March 7 the Christchurch City Mission will become the official “dwelling” for up to 50 people living with us that night.
We help homeless people in many ways and supporting them to do the 2023 Census is yet another.
On the night homeless people will be sleeping in our men’s and women’s emergency accommodations, men and women will be sleeping in our new Whakaora Kāinga transitional housing facility, we will have men and women staying in our onsite residential detox facility and also across the city in our residential addiction recovery support home in Edgeware.
All will be encouraged and supported to take part in the Census by our staff because they need to be included in the summary of the nation.
It is their right, and also the data is important to inform us all about their situations and steer appropriate help towards vulnerable communities in the future.
“They should be counted, and heard, and understood as much as any citizen,” says City Missioner Corinne Haines.
Support for filling out the Census is also being offered to men and women who are taking part in our day programmes. These programmes offer companionship, new skills, and access to our wide range of services to people who are often isolated, lonely and vulnerable.
We know it will be a challenge to get a number of people we care for to complete the forms.
They will find the forms confusing, confronting and stressful and that can be for many reasons ranging from basic literacy problems to paranoia and distrust over how providing their details could be used against them.
City Mission Client Education Team Leader Harriet English says one person she helped with the form asked afterwards “have I passed?” - which showed the level of understanding about the Census form.
“There is an element of fear that you are going to fail in one more test in your life.”
“There is an element of fear that you are going to fail in one more test in life.”
City Mission Accommodation Team Leader Stacy Potter says some clients will need help with the language of the forms.
“They can get tripped up on things like ‘what ethnicity do you identify with?’ They'll be like, ‘what does that mean’? They don't know. Sometimes they think it means religion and things like that.”
Probably the biggest hurdle will be a deep-seated distrust of Government agencies and of having themselves and their lives exposed by the questions. Stacy says they find it hard to accept assurances that the information remains private at an individual level.
But she says the best way to approach it – as we have done around voting and vaccination – is to point out they can help others by taking part.
“If you can explain to them the purpose of the data and what it’s used for and what it can do collectively for the homeless community and what’s happening around housing issues, they’ll often think that’s enough buy-in for them.”
“If you explain to them the purpose of the data and what it's used for and what it can do collectively for the homeless community and what’s happening for people around housing issues, they'll often think that’s enough buy-in for them.”
Stacy says a few will refuse outright, but many clients might surprisingly say yes because they care about each other collectively “more than they care about themselves”.
This is what happened around vaccination. We thought very few would agree to vaccination but what happened was the opposite.
Almost all our emergency shelter residents got their jabs when they heard that it was a way of to keep safe each other and the staff who cared for them at the Mission.