Mobilizing colleges and schools to welcome all new voters
UMD hosted the National Student Vote Summit last month. This is just the beginning of our work to address the grand challenge of mobilizing colleges and schools to welcome all new voters.
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Dear Friends,
At the University of Maryland we are committed to tackling the grand challenges facing society by mobilizing the full power of UMD’s talent, knowledge, and convening power. That’s why we are so excited at the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement to be working with our colleagues at the College of Education, Merrill College of Journalism, and School of Public Policy as part of the Maryland Democracy Initiative.
This interdisciplinary work is urgent and important. All across the world, we see new voters participating at lower rates than voters who have been participating for many years. This problem is particularly acute in the United States where the disparity in participation rates between younger and older voters is especially large. This failure to include new voters weakens our society and leaves democracies across the world less resilient in the face of growing long term threats.
Both the K-12 and higher education systems offer extraordinary opportunities to welcome all new voters to our democracy. Seizing these opportunities requires us to weave together expertise from across disciplines in original and unique ways.
How UMD is addressing the grand challenge of mobilizing colleges and schools to welcome all new voters
For many years, the University of Maryland has hosted important efforts to welcome new voters. The award-winning TerpsVote Coalition works to ensure that 100% of vote eligible UMD students vote in every election. At CDCE, we have played a leadership role in establishing the Student Vote Research Network and our scholars have published several important papers addressing key issues in the field.
Now, with the support of partners across the university we are thrilled to be dramatically expanding our shared efforts to address the challenge of mobilizing educational institutions to welcome all new voters.
The National Student Vote Summit comes to UMD
Last month, we were thrilled to work with our partners at the Maryland Democracy Initiative and TerpsVote to bring the National Student Vote Summit to the University of Maryland. As Governor Wes Moore shared in his welcome video - which you can view by clicking the box below - attendees grappled with the most urgent questions they face in their movement to “leave no student voter behind.”
This annual summit is one of the most important non-partisan spaces where stakeholders across the country come together to figure how to move towards 100% student voting. We were proud to host this summit in deep partnership with the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition, the national hub and largest non-partisan network in the country devoted to increasing student voter participation.
These kinds of deep partnerships with practitioner communities are at the core of our strategy at CDCE. These relationships allow us to bring the full interdisciplinary power of the University of Maryland to bear on the challenge of mobilizing educational institutions to welcome all new voters in America to our democracy. The problems our partners face are complex. Our university response must be interdisciplinary because the problems our partners are facing are inherently interdisciplinary! So when CDCE works with partners like the SLSV Coalition, we not only help them access faculty in political science, we also work to help them access all the talent, knowledge, and convening power at UMD.
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At CDCE we engage in these kinds of strategic and accountable relationships with community partners because they allow us to do the best work we can do as a university. It was such an honor for us to be able to host the National Student Vote Summit with our partners from across UMD and the SLSV Coalition this year! We are so excited to keep building on the momentum and relationships built through this summit.
CDCE seeds important projects on high school voter registration programs
In addition to our work with the SLSV Coalition on the ways higher education can welcome new voters, we are also doing significant work at CDCE to address K-12 educational systems as well. This year we were thrilled to welcome Jahnavi Rao - the founder of New Voters - to CDCE as a senior fellow focused on research related to understanding how high schools can more effectively welcome new voters to our democracy.
In recent months, we have begun hosting a regular strategy call for organizations from across the country working on high school voter registration efforts and are planning an in-person meeting of these leaders on campus this winter. By giving community partners space to share knowledge and launching new original research projects with them, we plan to play a leading role in providing educators and the public with critically important knowledge about how high schools can take action to include all new voters in the 2024 elections.
We are just getting started in our efforts to address the grand challenge of welcoming all new voters to our democracy
In the coming weeks, we will have several exciting announcements to share about upcoming programming at CDCE that will dramatically accelerate our work with colleagues at the College of Education and from all across UMD to mobilize educational institutions to welcome all new voters. These programs will mobilize the talent of UMD students, the research of UMD faculty, and the incredible convening power of our campus to strengthen democracy ahead of a major presidential election. 2023 has been such an amazing year for us at CDCE, and we can’t wait to see what we can accomplish together with all of you in 2024!
Mike Hanmer is Director of UMD’s Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement. Sam Novey is Chief Strategist at the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement.
It has been amazing to be part of the CDCE team! Excited for all the important work we’ll do in the New Year.