Voter Mobilization Challenge

During the summer of 2020, the Larchmont Girls Build LA team participated in the Voter Mobilization challenge launched by Girls Build LA. The purpose of this challenge was to engage the youth community to vote (or preregister to vote) for the 2020 Presidential Election.

It was noticeable that the youth in our school community was not actively engaged in these elections. However, it was not that the young people do not have an interest in politics. It is because:

• They are confused by the complex and unclear voter registration guidelines.

• They do not feel like they know enough to vote.

• They are not taught how the government and elections work.

• They are not encouraged by their family, friends, or community.

• They feel like voting would not make a difference.

(John Holbein, Why So Few Young Americans Vote (The Conversation, 2020))

To better educate the youth in our school community, we went around all the homerooms/packs of our high school campus and gave an informative presentation (here is the link to our presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1dg0EgYcSZOjZ-XZgXCHeNXHE1lns3et_zdnCg54vED4/edit#slide=id.g98298f7424_0_16). Through this presentation, we pursued to have engaging conversations with our upper and lowerclassmen to pique their interest further. Those who decided to preregister or register to vote signed a Google Form that we designed (for tracking purposes).

Furthermore, we designed numerous flyers and posted them on our social media platform. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we did not go out often to hand out physical copies of these flyers. However, one of our flyers was posted on the nearby college campus (when college students were still on-campus).

Through this challenge, our team learned many valuable lessons. Some of these lessons include:

1. Voting is essential to making the right changes in our nation.

2. Engaging in these types of conversations revolving around politics (although one might not be so knowledgeable) should be encouraged.

3. Social Media is such a powerful resource. Especially during this pandemic, social media has been a vital networking platform.