Introducing the 1,000 Schools Challenge and Ready to Vote Coalition

I’m thrilled to introduce The Civics Center’s 1,000 Schools Challenge, undertaken with the newly formed Ready to Vote Coalition. The goal of the Challenge is to support youth-led voter registration efforts in 1,000 schools around the country. The Ready to Vote Coalition includes national, state and local groups, listed below, that recognize and value the goal of improving civic engagement in high school. Together, we can improve low youth voter registration rates and create an annual tradition of civic engagement in our schools.

During the Vietnam War, 18-year-olds were drafted, but couldn’t vote to have a say in whether they should’ve been at war at all. Students demanded that the voting age be lowered to 18, and the 26th Amendment was ratified. The Constitution now allows more young people to vote, but we haven’t developed the educational and cultural infrastructure to empower them to do so. Once again, youth are feeling the urgency to participate in national decisions; we can harness this energy and build the infrastructure to help, rather than discourage, young people to use the Constitutional right they gained almost fifty years ago.

The Civics Center has already started this work. Last September, we launched High School Voter Registration Week, in which we supported students in 60 schools across 25 states who registered 4,000 of their peers. We built our Coalition to reach out to their youth networks, held workshops for those students, and mailed them Democracy in a Box: a toolkit with stickers, pens, clipboards, and more. Many said they were eager to hold another drive this year. Now, we’re growing our Coalition, expanding our volunteer network, and ordering lots of stickers to multiply our outreach and support 1,000 schools.

Imagine a future in which each year, students held voter registration drives in their schools where they discussed their values, built their capacity to make change, and of course, registered to vote. These drives would be among the rituals of the high school experience, a sort of coming-of-age for citizenship, its own form of graduation.

I hope that you’ll join us by recruiting high school students to hold drives through financial support, volunteering, amplifying the message, or joining the Ready to Vote Coalition.  

The Ready to Vote Coalition includes: American Constitution Society, C5 Los Angeles, Chi-Town GVP Summit, Civic Spirit, Earth Day Network, Every Vote Counts, Future Coalition, Generation Citizen, Generation Nation, Girls Learn International, Issue Voter, Make it 100, March for our Lives, March to the Polls, Philly Youth VOTE!, Teen Health Mississippi, Texas Civil Rights Project, Voter Education and Participation for Youth, VoteRiders, Voto Latino, Youth Activism Project, YMCA Youth & Government, and YVoteNY / Next Gen Politics. 

Join the coalition at thecivicscenter.org/home/#R2VCoalition.  To learn more about how The Civics Center and the Ready to Vote Coalition are working to achieve the goal of the 1,000 Schools Challenge, click here.

James Wenz is the Outreach Coordinator for The Civics Center, a recent graduate of Brown University, and a musician. He can be contacted about The Civics Center at james@thecivicscenter.org.