Fair Elections Center is a national, nonpartisan, non-profit voting rights and election reform organization based in Washington, D.C. The Center’s mission is to use litigation, advocacy, and campus organizing to remove barriers to registration and voting, particularly those disenfranchising underrepresented and marginalized communities, and to improve election administration. The Center engages with youth voters by organizing college campuses through its Campus Vote Project, which is in its 11th year.
The Center’s Campus Vote Project (CVP) is designed to boost democratic engagement of college students through helping campus partners integrate civic engagement into the academic lives of the institutions. This is done, in part, through the Voter Friendly Campus (VFC) designation program where campuses plan, implement, and evaluate democratic efforts centered around federal election cycles, run in partnership with NASPA (the student affairs professionals association). CVP hires undergraduate student Democracy Fellows on campuses. Fellows support their campuses in VFC programming, building peer to peer outreach around voting and other democratic engagement activities (such as poll working, census participation, and participating in map drawing during redistricting). Democracy Fellows play a critical role in motivating their peers, faculty, and college administrators to take part in nonpartisan democratic engagement activities on their campuses.
Campus Vote Project currently works with students, staff, and faculty on over 250 campus via our Fellowship program and the Voter Friendly Campus designation. Since 2020, we have evaluated the Fellowship program from the perspective of student Fellows, but have not evaluated our programs from the perspectives of campus staff, administrators, and faculty. We are looking to start that evaluation process in order to:
- Better understand how staff, administrators, and faculty perceive and use our programming.
- Determine which areas we need to improve and how to make that improvement.
- Grow our outreach with campus faculty, which is a fairly new focus for the project.
- Make a stronger case to potential donors who may fund our on campus efforts.
We expect that research for this project will include a survey and/or interviews of current program participants.
Stakeholders may include: Campus Vote Project staff, program participants as listed above, Fair Elections Center Board, and potential funders.
A successful project should include two items:
1) Report of findings from research with campus administrators, staff, and faculty.
2) A strategic plan that will include ways to improve current outreach with campus staff and administrators, as well as how to build in new work with campus faculty.
We don't have deadlines for any of these items, but the graduate students who may work on this should know that we have found it to be particularly hard to be in touch with our campus contacts over the summer.
