Our movement to increase student voting and improve political equity is about to get bigger and stronger! To meet the unprecedented challenges our democracy is currently facing, The Andrew Goodman Foundation (AGF) is expanding our Andrew Goodman Vote Everywhere Network to help activate and mobilize more young citizens to vote and participate in making decisions that will affect their futures.
For the past five years, our signature Andrew Goodman Vote Everywhere program has proved effective at empowering student leaders to engage their peers in participatory democracy by removing voting barriers and advocating with faculty and administrators to institutionalize voter engagement. Since 2014, Andrew Goodman Campuses have increased their voter registration rates by as much as 25%, voter turnout rates among registered students by 38%, and voter turnout rates by as much as 23%.
To build on this success, AGF is launching new levels of engagement in 2020. The three levels—Member, Partner, and Leader—will receive varying degrees of ongoing advising and financial support, access to AGF’s online student voting portal my.VoteEverywhere, training, swag, and other civic and voter engagement resources. These new pathways of engagement will enable increased peer-to-peer learning and collective action in our national network, which we know is at the heart of real change.
We will soon begin recruiting new institutions as Members in 10 states, including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin. As we focus on Minority Serving Institutions, Community Colleges, and institutions in Southern, competitive, or historically disenfranchised states, we will expand the Andrew Goodman Vote Everywhere Network to 140 campuses and double our potential reach to 2.5 million students in time for the 2020 Presidential Election.
We are also proud to announce that we have selected five Andrew Goodman Campus Teams as Leaders, which will allow them to organize themselves with less support from AGF and to function as thought leaders and mentors who strengthen our Network. We expect to add Leaders as more of our Partners can demonstrate a long-term commitment to student political engagement, embrace AGF’s promising practices, and become more independent. We congratulate our first Leaders:
- Binghamton University
- Bowling Green State University
- Stony Brook University
- University of Michigan – Ann Arbor
- Western Carolina University
This new expansion strategy will allow us to build on our successes and help to realize the promise that the youth vote holds for strengthening our democracy—in 2020 and beyond!
Onwards and upwards,
Karena Cronin
Program Director, The Andrew Goodman Foundation
Catalyzing Impact 