As part of our efforts to expand conversations on our 2023/2024 theme, “Trust the Vote”, we were elated to have hosted the 2023 Wisconsin Campus Voting Summit. The summit equipped over 40 civil leaders and college voting advocates with creative tactics to help ignite interest in voting on their various campuses. The state-wide event, which took place at the Lubar Entrepreneurship Center, comprised civil learning, design-thinking panels, and solution-oriented creative sessions. It helped attendees, which included representatives from the Wisconsin Disability Vote Coalition, League of Women’s Voters, the Center for Artistic Activism, All Voting is Local, Fair Elections Center, and Common Cause, to map out actionable steps to create voter awareness among college students and increase student voter turnout in future election cycles.
In an introduction to attendees, the Mayor of Milwaukee, Cavalier Johnson, emphasized the need for every eligible voter to not only register, but also vote. While expressing pride in the summit, he encouraged the campus advocates to ensure that students in their schools voted, because a single vote can be the deciding factor in who gets to lead and represent their interests.
The summit included a series of workshops covering diverse topics, such as inspiring students through civic engagement and crafting an action plan to make the campus more voter friendly. Additionally, participants learned strategies for campus involvement and reaching out to fellow students. There were discussions on how local elections can impact the careers and education of voters. To help the attendees draw from past experiences, the 2022 Voter Friendly Campus report was disseminated and analyzed at the summit. A central question that emerged during the summit was, “If there were no obstacles hindering increased voter turnout in the upcoming election, what measures would you take to motivate members of your community to participate?”
While hosting a panel session on the power of partnering with designers and visual communicators, C21 Director, Anne Basting, spoke on the power of storytelling in building trust. It is essential to use every avenue at our disposal to instill a sense of civic engagement in children. She cites the Center’s Story Cart project and the importance of trust in the civic landscape. “Trust and the Vote is gathering those stories about what voting is? How do we do it, and why?” The Center applied for a grant to work with student illustrators. If the grant is approved, Anne emphasized, “We are going to work with student illustrators, and work with the children center to do drawings. Then we will create student books that will come out in Fall. We can then use these to teach the kids to vote.”
Design Thinking Specialist, Lauren Robertson, reiterated the need to apply design thinking in creating tools that ensure the accessibility of election materials to every member of society, “Are we creating tools that are easy to access and utilize?” Contributing to the importance of increasing civic awareness in children, she opines that, “We can all be designers, what we make really matters. We should be giving them the exposure to all the avenues where they are able to make positive change.”
Wisconsin State coordinator for the Campus Vote Project, Kristin Hansen, expressed profound enthusiasm that the attendees will put all their learnings to practice. To this end, all campus voting representatives in attendance were assured of grant support for awareness creation and community engagement in their respective schools.
