Resources
Below are resources for college administrators seeking to create more voter friendly campuses.
2019 2nd Edition
Strengthening American Democracy:
A Guide for Developing an Action Plan to Increase Civic Learning, Political Engagement, and Voter Participation Among College StudentsThis improved and expanded guide is designed to help faculty, staff, and students write strong campus action plans to increase nonpartisan civic learning, political engagement, and voter participation among college students. It provides a framework for developing and documenting institutional goals and strategies. It is not meant to be prescriptive and should be adapted to your institutional context.
2019 2nd Edition
Strengthening American Democracy:
RubricThe accompanying rubric is designed to help you self-assess your campus democratic engagement action plan so that you can identify potential areas for improvement and build on existing strengths.
Democracy Counts: A Report on U.S. College and University Student Voting
Aggregating data from 1,023 higher education institutions and 9,784,931 student records, the 2016 NSLVE report shows that students voted at a higher rate in 2016 than 2012 by about three percentage points, rising from 45.1% to 48.3%. This report includes turnout data by demographic criteria, field of study, class year, age group, and more.
ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge Resource Hub
Action plan development, voter registration, voter education, and voter turnout resources--and much more!
The National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement
The National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE) offers colleges and universities an opportunity to learn their student registration and voting rates and, for interested campuses, a closer examination of their campus climate for political learning and engagement and correlations between specific student learning experiences and voting. Click on the report here to see a sample report, or visit the following website for more information: http://activecitizen.tufts.edu/research/nslve/.
ideas 42 Research
Check out the recent ideas42 publication, Graduating Students into Voters. It discuses eight psychological barriers faced by student voters and nine actionable design principles college leaders can use to overcome them.
Andrew Goodman Foundation's Vote Everywhere Ambassador Handbook
Vote Everywhere, The Andrew Goodman Foundation’s signature program, builds a national, nonpartisan, civic engagement movement of student leaders and university partners. Since its inception, Vote Everywhere has expanded to 21 states and engages over 100 student Ambassadors. The current network of 46 campuses encompasses a voting population of nearly a million students. This handbook lays out the roles & responsibilities, expectations, and best practices around the program, as well as training overviews on nonprofit nonpartisanship, building & leading teams, voter registration, strategic campus planning, media engagement, data & reporting, and development.
Teaching Civic Engagement Across the Disciplines
For a democracy to function effectively, its citizens must participate. Furthermore, these same citizens must deliberate effectively, engage with one another, and arrive at workable compromises. Although these skills are critical for a vibrant society, the means to learn and develop them is lacking in American education today. Teaching Civic Engagement Across the Disciplines evaluates the goals, challenges, and rewards of integrating civic education into the curriculum, highlighting best practices across disciplines and campuses.
A Crucible Moment: College Learning & Democracy's Future
"Civic learning needs to be an integral component of every level of education, from grade school through graduate school, across all fields of study.”
Spotlight on MSIs: Turning Student Activism into Votes
Examining key issues that affect student and racial and ethnic minority turnout across the nation, this report explores the impact of the distance from campuses to polling sites, the time it takes to get to those sites, and why these factors disproportionately affect students and minorities. It also studies various policies that perpetuate voter suppression and other challenges that fall outside of the general structure of voting, such as misinformation, miscommunication, and racism.
Institutionalizing Voter Engagement: A Guide to Developing and Adopting Handbook Language
Institutionalizing Voter Engagement was created to help campuses unpack what institutionalizing voter engagement means and further campuses’ ability to prepare students as active citizens. The guide provides a working definition for voter engagement, methods for building programs, and arguments to support engaging students as voters. The purpose of Institutionalizing Voter Engagement is to support administrators in developing and implementing handbook language that commits institutions to carrying out voter engagement.
