After 2000, the Census began collecting a lot of their data through an ongoing survey called the American Community Survey mailed to a small sample of households — instead of through their once–every–ten–year door–to–door survey. Now they pull together five years of American Community Surveys to have a large enough sample in any one neighborhood to provide estimates for that neighborhood. For this reason, data for 2016–2020 describe average conditions reported during the period of January 2016 – December 2020.
Here are some examples of how you can write about this data in a grant report:
“Looking across the five years from 2016 to 2020, the Census Bureau estimates that X% of residents had a high school education or higher…”
“In the five years following 2016, neighborhood statistical area X has experienced a poverty rate of…”
“From 2016 to 2020, X% of residents reported having a commute of X minutes or more to work…”
Source: A Compass for Understanding and Using American Community Survey Data. U.S. Census Bureau. Retrieved January 25, 2017 from https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2008/acs/ACSGeneralHandbook.pdf