What role can presidents and chancellors play in youth civic engagement?

The level of civic participation on campuses varies widely. Your campus may have an active and engaged group of students that registers and mobilizes their peers to vote every election cycle or you may have a campus with very little engagement. Regardless, student  leaders face issues of high turnover and it is often difficult to transfer the systems that work to register and mobilize students to vote from year to year to ensure their permanence. That’s where presidents and chancellors come in! The college or university administration is on campus for the long run. They are able to provide institutional mechanisms to support youth civic engagement each and every year. The first step is signing the Presidents Commitment to Civic Engagement. The next step is creating a comprehensive plan to support youth civic engagement on your campus.

How do I create a comprehensive plan to support youth civic engagement?

Each campus is different and each plan will be different but we can provide a model for creating a plan that you can tailor to your campus. The important thing is to make sure that all the key stakeholders are involved in the process – from students to faculty to administrators to staff. The plan is what turns the Presidents Commitment from a piece of paper to a real mechanism for improving youth civic participation and American democracy.

How can I make sure it is tailored to my campus? For instance, what if we already allow X students access to the dorms on X days? Does the commitment put that system in jeopardy?

The Presidents Commitment is designed to be tailored to individual campuses. That is why each campus creates a comprehensive plan for their unique institution. If you already have a specific policy on access to the dorms for civic participation drives, that’s fine. The document simply requires that at some point Student Government Associations and Non-Partisan Campus Vote Coalitions are allowed into the dorms to register their fellow students to vote and to turn them out to vote. You can set the specific policy around that to make it work for your campus.

What does a permanent financial commitment entail? 

The amount of funds devoted to civic participation work on campuses varies from campus to campus. The commitment requires that a permanent line item in the institution’s budget goes to this work. However, the amount is up to the individual campus. Some campuses devote permanent funds through the student government. Some campuses give permanent resources to the non-partisan campus vote coalition. However a campus allocates the funds and for whatever amount, the important thing is that a dedicated source of funds exists to ensure that this work is ongoing and continual.

What else can I do to help? 

If you are an administrator, reach out to your colleagues at other colleges and universities and encourage them to commit. We hope to see a groundswell of support for youth civic participation coming from college and university presidents across the country. If you are a student, reach out to your friends on different campuses and encourage them to get involved and get their presidents on board!