Polish club to address Polonia survey

YOUNGSTOWN — The Polish Arts Club of Youngstown will have a general meeting from 2 p.m. Jan. 10 at Poland Library, 311 S. Main St. This meeting is free and open to the public.

The speaker will be Thaddeus Radzilowski, president of the Piast Institute, a Hamtramck, Mich.-based organization for Polish American Affairs. He will speak about the U.S. Census and the Modern Polonia Survey.

The survey is an anonymous 49-question online survey to find out more about the attitudes of Polish Americans of all generations in regard to key public issues, their ideas for the future of the Polish community and their feelings about the values that should motivate Polonia.

The Polonia survey is a reaction to the plans for the 2010 U.S. Census form. In a departure from 2000 and previous decades, the form offers no question about people’s ancestry, prompting concern among many ethnic communities who say marking “white” isn’t enough. They fear they will lose their fair share of federal and private dollars because institutions often rely on Census data to allocate funds.