Our campus teams work at 11 universities across North Carolina to engage and mobilize students, while also advocating for youth issues on campus.
Civic Engagement
We begin our grassroots organizational work long before election day by civically engaging students through our on-campus events series. These events educate and excite students about politics. We also work with different student groups and appeal to different interests to engage historically disengaged students. We have hosted an array of events including speaker series with Congressional Representatives, roundtables with local activists, art-activism events where students can channel their artistic skills into activism, and civic-related game nights like political jeopardy. These events have provided over 6,000 students across North Carolina an opportunity to learn more about politics while increasing their sense of civic responsibility.
Student Voter Mobilization
To build the political power of young people, we mobilize students around our campuses to vote. That work starts with registering students to vote all across campus. We go into class and club meetings, table at major university events, and launch campus-wide media campaigns to ensure students are registered to vote.
Then, we partner with university offices and student groups to build a grass-roots voter turnout campaign. This campaign leverages both traditional and social media to raise awareness about the importance of voting in an election and helps students understand the Voter ID requirements to vote on their campus.
Over our 11 campuses, this operation has registered over 1,700 new students voters. We have also reached over 10,000 students with high-quality, in-person mobilizations.
University Pro-Democracy Advocacy
To ensure high-levels of student turnout in the long-term, our teams advocate for pro-democracy reforms on campus. One of those reforms include our no-class Democracy Days on their campuses. Democracy Day is a day during the early voting period when classes are canceled to give students time to vote. Civic engagement programming is also held to create a focus on voting during the day among students. Universities that have canceled classes for elections, on average, experience a sustained 12% increase in student-voter turnout. This day would make thousands more young voices heard in the political process.
In our inaugural Democracy Day at Duke University in 2022, classes were still held, but we coordinated a full day of campus events with various groups on campus. We hosted events that appealed to a wide array of students interested, including art, music, and wellness events. We also hosted former-RNC chairman and Lincoln Project Co-Founder Michael Steele alongside Durham City Councilmembers. The day resulted in a doubling of early-voting compared to other early voting days (we mobilized over 300 more students to vote on this day alone!).
Additionally, we have mobilized at Board of Election meetings to ensure access to on-campus early voting locations for students. With many students not having access to reliable transportation, on-campus voting locations provide many students the only opportunity they have to make their voices heard. We mobilize students on every campus to attend the County Board of Elections to advocate for on-campus voting locations. Through this advocacy, 8 out of 11 of our campuses have on-campus voting locations.
