By Joe Morey
News Editor
In just a couple of weeks, survey field workers will be out randomly choosing households for data collection as part of the LCO Community Needs Assessment. The workers will be out knocking on doors and conducting surveys with the Lac Courte Oreilles community members.
“If your home is selected in the random process, please let them in and we invite you to participate in the survey,” said Curtis DeCora, recently hired as Project Coordinator. “This survey is something that will only help improve our community, the more accurate information we can collect, the more funding opportunities will exist deriving from those accurate data sets.”
DeCora explained how it’s something we hear all the time, how there isn’t enough funding for this or that, but, “If we could get accurate data from our reservation that was current, it would help when we apply for funding from federal, state or private sector sources. The funding sources are currently using data from a 10-year old U.S. Census.”
For example, DeCora said our tribe was recently denied a Veterans Housing Voucher Program grant because, according to data used, our tribe only had six veterans. It’s out of date, he explained.
“Imagine how much more data is wrong across other platforms, such as education, healthcare, transportation, economic development, and so on.” DeCora said. “Roughly 55 to 65% of US Census data is correct, which means tribes are getting only about 55 to 65% of funding available to them.”
DeCora said the LCO Community Assessment is still hiring survey field workers and recommends anyone interested in applying to visit the tribal website employment page at lco-nsn.gov/employment.