learning to reach 100% student voting

how academic scholars, local partners, and community organizers will work together to figure out how to achieve transformational change

Dear Friends,

Last week we launched the Student Vote Research Network with a simple premise: it’s going to take all of us to figure out how to reach 100% student voter participation.

We can imagine the work of achieving transformational change as putting together a puzzle.

Each of us has a piece.

Our work in the SVRN is about figuring out how to put those puzzle pieces together.

Here is how we are going to do that.

First, we are going to synthesize and translate some of the amazing work that advanced academic scholars have done on student voting so that it can reach a broader audience. We will be reaching out in the coming weeks to authors from the 2018 Student Vote Workshop at MIT to summarize and post the key research findings established there. We will also be working with the scholars who presented at the inaugural SVRN workshop last week to develop public summaries of their research through this State of the Student Vote Newsletter.

Second, we are going to be elevating the knowledge and learning of our local partners, especially the extraordinary students and emerging academic scholars developing their work through the Campus Vote Project Research Collective. This group brings an incredible mix of academic rigor and lived experience of student voter mobilization efforts to the network which will complement the contributions of our advanced academic scholars.

Finally, we are going to be working with our community organizers to surface great research questions and broker the trusting relationships we need with campuses and local partners. A huge part of the puzzle of 100% student voting is collecting and organizing pieces of knowledge and information from thousands of local partners across the country. Many of the community organizers in the Student Vote Research Network are already doing extraordinary service as data stewards, maintaining datasets that the whole community needs to build knowledge together about how to reach 100% student voter participation. We established a data access process for scholars looking to use these datasets. Please click here to let our community organizers know your data wishlist!

We will be in touch in the coming weeks as the research projects we presented at last week’s workshop move out of the concept phase and into the field.

We can’t wait to see what we will learn in this journey together to figure out how to achieve 100% student voter participation.

Best,

Dr. Melissa R. Michelson (on behalf of the SVRN Steering Committee)

P.S. We also need to keep growing! Do you know someone who might have a unique perspective or piece of the 100% student voting puzzle to share? Maybe a scholar who has done research in a different or adjacent area that could be applied in this context? A student who wants to get involved in research? A philanthropic partner or strategist who should be plugged into what we are learning? A community organizer or local partner trying something really interesting on their campus? Please forward this email to them and invite them to join SVRN.