Activist Page
Ready to do some legwork to help pre-register a whole lot of juniors and seniors in high school? We’ll be approaching every school with an enrollment of over 300. Our project involves multiple approaches to all teachers of 11th and 12th grade social studies or civics, offering resources, free materials, and an online registration facilitation workshop. Our hope is to persuade teachers and schools to permanently incorporate adopt pre-registration facilitation curriculum, establishing Voter Friendly High Schools that will facilitate young voter readiness, year after year.
This a new project and we’re not aware of any other organization that has used this scale of relational organizing to spread pre-registration practices. So we’ll be doing a lot of testing, and experimenting, to maximize our effectiveness and we’ll be looking for your feedback.
To participate, fill out the form below. Leave the question about which school you want to work with, empty for now.
After you fill it out you’ll get an email with the password to the page with the map of the NYC schools we’re approaching. The password is there to protect school safety. Once you see the map, pick the largest school that’s close to you.
Return to the form you submitted; and click where it says, “Edit Your Response”. Enter the name of the school you hope to support.
Recruit some friends for your team! There is more than enough work to go around, so we’re really, really grateful for whoever you draw in. But we’re especially interested, as always, in recruiting people who are likeminded (in that they care about democracy) but AREN”T currently engaged in activism. Ask one of them to help you register the Largest Generation! We’ll be working with teens and teachers, so in addition, if you can find folks who have some experience with youth, teachers, schools, public speaking, that’s great. But literally anyone with willingness to help, and good cheer, will make a great partner. If you don’t know anyone, we’ll pair you up.
Here’s what your work will look like:
Bring registration forms, our free materials, and treats you fund—donuts, cookies, whatever—to the teachers. This could take a couple of passes, because not all teachers will come on board, at once.
Answer any questions any of them may have, with kindness and patience; help them solve any problems.
Find your Community Board! (Hopefully it’s the same one as the school sits in) and get yourself on the schedule to present at the general meeting. You’ll have three minutes to tell the community about what we’re doing, and make them aware of the pre-registration opportunities we’re creating, and the resources on our website. We’ll give you notes.
Most teachers will take the curriculum and manage it themselves, but some may want one of our team to make the pre-registration facilitation workshop presentation. It’s not hard; it’s about 15 slides which we send to the teachers to put up on a screen. We’ll train you.
Follow up with the teachers, to find out what they experienced! We’ll have a questionaire but many teachers won’t want to fill it out, so you may be soliciting their feedback in quick, informal exchanges.
Answer questions from students, whom we’ll be following up with on social media. We’ve got a whole bunch of resources on our page, for how they can get ID, and ways they can help make their school a voter-friendly school!
This is a project that could produce huge and durable gains to our young voter pool. Youth voters, once registered, voted at a rate of 86% in 2022!