True Diversity

Everyone knows that the population in the United States is growing, but many do not know that the nonwhite population is growing much faster than the white population. According to a report released earlier this month by the Brookings Institution nonwhites accounted for all the growth in the youth population from 2000 to 2010. In almost half of states and nearly one-third of large metro areas, overall child populations declined in the 2000s and now ten states and 35 large metro areas have minority white child populations.

The LA Times published further information about the report:

The study authored by William Frey used new data from the 2010 U.S. Census to find the nationwide population of white children declined by 4.3 million, while Asian and Latino children grew by 5.5 million.

“It’s an old story for Los Angeles, but it’s a new story for most of the rest of the country,” Frey said Wednesday. “California and Los Angeles are on the front lines of this.”

Frey said the new trends could be useful for school systems and policymakers who need to provide services for different youth populations and who need to “bridge the divide between older white residents who don’t see the needs of some of those younger more diverse populations.”

I hope that school systems and policy makers will indeed use this new information when they are making decisions. It seems like the best decisions are generally made by individuals who have all of the information.

I am currently volunteering with a very diverse group of people to provide the best food that we can for our local food bank in Wallingford, a neighborhood in Seattle. The greenhouse group I volunteer with has been planting seeds and starting an amazing amount of vegetables. Once the starts are ready to be planted, they are given to local pea patch volunteers and the vegetables, once they are grown and edible, will be donated back to our food bank. Before starting the process this year, we took a poll of the people who get food from this food bank to find out what they would prefer to receive and were surprised by some of the results. The growing Asian and Russian population there asked for Bok Choi, Chinese Cabbage and various other vegetables that we have never tried to grow before. We are very happy that we know more about the people we are helping and can serve them the things that they want the most. We were able to do this without the results from the Brookings Institution, but hopefully this report will get others thinking about the growing diversity too!

Writer: Catherine Otten was a Program Manager and Administrator for Futurist.com in 2007 and again in 2010-2011. We lost her to cancer in 2016. An avid outdoors woman and mountain climber, Catherine was especially passionate about the environment.