New Voters July: Reaching New Heights 🙌
Handcrafted updates about our voter registration efforts in our goal to register one million youth voters.
A Letter from the Leaders 📝
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By Jahnavi Rao and Nivea Krishnan
“The simple truth is that our organization would not be where it is today without people like you believing in us.”
To our New Voters community,
This is Jahnavi and Nivea, and we’re the Founder and Executive Director (respectively) of New Voters. First off, we wanted to thank you for your enduring support for the work we do. The simple truth is that our organization would not be where it is today without people like you believing in us.
We’ve come a long way since launching nationally in 2020. To date, we have registered 80,000 students and reached thousands more across 40 states and 300 high school chapters. We’ve made our national team more representative of this nationwide mission to engage young people, bringing in high school and college students from all over the country as interns and directors. Through this expansion period, New Voters has come to identify its True North: comprehensive youth civic engagement. With youth voter registration at our core, we have made significant strides in expanding other important elements of youth engagement. From our Policy department championing legislation to expand access to registration materials in PA high schools, to our Technology department pushing the frontier of civic technology, to our Research Network publishing findings on youth engagement, we are doing it all.
The two of us are thrilled to keep you updated on our work building up to the next big milestone in the civic engagement space: the 2024 election cycle. As we all know, there are no off-years, and New Voters is breaking new ground as we zero in on key states to build up civic infrastructure for young people. By the end of this year, we plan on launching state-wide New Voters branches in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Florida, Georgia, and California to scale up our organizing efforts. We are also excited to further develop our partnerships and collaborations with other organizations in this space, hosting in-person summits and jointly advocating for voting rights legislation. Above all, we are thrilled to keep bringing more empowered young people into our organization through our internship, research assistant, and fellowship programs.
Once again, none of this would be possible without your support. Thank you for believing in us - your faith in us is what motivates us to do this work.
Best,
Jahnavi and Nivea
🌟 Check Out Our July Op-Eds! 📰
“Why do you have to make everything political?” by Darik de Jong
Advocacy: What Is It, and How Can Young People Get Involved? by Brooke Allan
2023 Sees Governor Hobbs’ Record-Breaking Vetoes for Arizona by Hannah Lui
Civic Engagement and Climate Action are Interconnected by Olivia Zhang
My Experience (so far) as a Communications Intern by Taylor Del Real
How to Increase High School Voter Engagement in Pennsylvania by Collin Wang
🌟 New Voters Updates 💬
The Development Department has been working on the first grant applications and has been hard at work researching state-specific grants.
The Policy Department met with Pennsylvania Representative Melissa Shusterman to discuss bill HB2699. A bill tracker will be going live to the public soon!
More on bill HB2699.
The Operations Department has been developing a curriculum to train students to run voter registration drives. They have also been working on ways to make resources more readily available for students!
The Communications Department has been soaring on socials! A recent reel garnered over 14k views and activity has spiked!
The Technology Department has been actively working to collaborate with YVote on a New York youth civic project! See the “Get Involved” section below for more information on participating with YVote.
The summer internship has reached its halfway point! We are very proud of our youth interns!
🌟 Get Involved! 👀
Follow New Voters on Instagram 📲
Reach out about student opportunities 📢
Join us in our New Era of Democracy: High School Voter Education Week - Fall 2023 Fellowship!🇺🇸 Click here to learn more. APPLY here. ⬅️
Are you invested in helping harness youth civic energy into sustained political collective power? ✊ Join 60 rising YVote ChangeMakers for a Youth Civic Expo on Tues, Aug 15 from 6:00-7:30 PM at the High School of Fashion Industries at 225 W 24th St in Manhattan, NYC to engage in interactive activities, games, and discussions around key issues of our times: climate justice, criminal justice, immigration justice, mental health justice, and racial justice. RSVP here. ⬅️
Sincerely,
Jahnavi, Nivea, and the New Voters Team