We’re often asked: Where does a donation to The Civics Center go? What we’re doing right now in Pittsburgh provides the answers.
High school students are asking questions of Pittsburgh Mayoral candidates and registering their peers so they will be ready to vote in the May 20 primary, Nov. PA SCt election, midterms, and beyond.
Last week, we were delighted when KDKA CBS News and NPR’s affiliate arrived at Obama and Westinghouse Academies in Pittsburgh to cover assemblies during which high school Seniors asked questions of current Mayoral candidates. They had worked with their teachers and a coalition we’ve been co-leading and growing for the last two years, the Allegheny Youth Vote Coalition,1 to prepare questions on every subject that mattered to them, from public school funding and gun violence prevention, to bus lines and the job market for recent high school graduates. This week, the same assemblies are taking place at three more high schools: Brashear, Carrick and SciTech. Next week, another three will do the same.
Why does the local press find this an interesting story? Because very few people think of high school students participating in real-life discussions with local officials as a means to improving political engagement in America. On the contrary, and distressingly, many pro-democracy donors seem to have made the unfortunate and misguided decision that young people are apathetic, disappointing, and not worth the effort.
We’ve been working with teens and their teachers since our founding in 2018, and we know from experience that when young people are taught what it means to live in and affect their democracy, they jump in with gusto. When we put it in their hands, in the form of real-life democratic activities such as candidate forums and non-partisan voter registration drives, they’re all in.
They are fired up to learn they have the right to speak out, organize, develop new skills, and impact the world around them by voting. Here’s what it looks like:
These things do not happen magically or by osmosis.
They happen when we make it happen. When we provide training, resources, data; when we develop and maintain key partnerships; when we build awareness so that everyone knows about pre-registration and the opportunity it represents. That is where your funding goes.
Expecting young people to absorb the importance of civic engagement in their lives without intentional and sustained guidance is how we arrived at mass youth disenfranchisement. In Pennsylvania, fewer than 40% of 18-year-olds are registered vs. 74% of those age 45 and above, as shown in the county-by-county maps below. Pennsylvania is just one example; the problem exists in almost every state we have studied.
Our country has no reliable and efficient system to welcome all young people into our democracy so they can register and vote as soon as they are old enough. The scale of the problem is enormous. In every midterm election this century, fewer than 35% of 18-year-olds nationally have been registered to vote, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s more than 2.5 million who should be using their voices at the ballot box, but won’t be able to.
If current systems were working effectively, our maps showing registration rates of 18-year-olds would not be so pale. To get a sense of the deficiencies in existing systems, see our earlier posts here and here.
What we’re doing today in Pittsburgh is similar to work we’ve also done in New Hampshire, Southern California, and Arizona, and it’s something we know works (more on that below). It’s something that should be happening right now across the United States, just as 4 million high school Seniors sit in classrooms; but once they graduate in a few short months, they will become much harder to find and engage. 40% of them will not go on to college. 40% of them do not have drivers licenses. Motor Voter laws don’t help them or the many more who get driver’s licenses before they are old enough to register.
Virtually everyone is old enough to register to vote before they graduate from high school. But in most places, the potential has gone unrealized. Most high schools have no training, plans, or assessment metrics to make sure their eligible students register. Many people don’t even know that students everywhere can register or preregister to vote before they turn 18.
OUR VISION
High school students can become the agents of their own political empowerment. We’ve seen them become leaders, embrace democracy and bring that power into their communities and their futures. When they begin to understand how government systems work in an educational environment, they form ideas about how our society can improve. They talk to and motivate their peers and families about issues that matter to them. They become civically engaged just as they are stepping into adulthood, significantly raising the chances they will become lifelong voters.
What’s needed most are relationships, trust, consistency, educational materials, and training programs; communications to raise awareness, to recruit, and to engage; data and systems for tracking and analysis, and, of course, SWAG.
What’s needed is an educational setting for the effort so students will be less subject to media manipulation and misinformation that are the bread and butter of their digital experience. What’s needed is to place students and schools at the center of the work.
Which brings me to the question at the start of this post. How does The Civics Center use financial support to make voter registration part of every high school in America, twice a year, every year, without pause? Let’s travel to Pittsburgh, PA, and I’ll tell you more about what’s happening right now, and how it has grown over the past two years.
PARTNERSHIPS
In the southwestern part of Pennsylvania, Allegheny County has a population of more than 1.2 million. There are 46 public school districts. Pittsburgh is the most populous city in the county, and more than 5,700 high school students attend nine schools in Pittsburgh Public Schools. 86% of district students identify as Black or otherwise non-White. All of the schools are Title I schools.
Two years ago, we made a commitment to Allegheny County and to Pittsburgh Public Schools. The scope involved learning what was needed and providing resources to help meet the need. We took time to listen, learn and plant seeds, and the progress and accomplishments have been palpable.
We are:
Working in and helping to build a coalition of state and local groups
Training students and educators in how to hold voter registration drives
Providing data to illustrate the discrepancy, motivate stakeholders and track progress
Creating an internship program for high school student leaders
Deploying multiple opportunities for educators to get trained and involved in shaping their students’ civic futures
In the spring of 2024, eight high schools in the county held drives. In fall 2024, 17 did so. This spring, all nine schools with high school programs in Pittsburgh Public Schools are holding candidate forums in connection with this year’s Mayoral race. Which should give you an idea of the enthusiasm we see on the ground and in person.
The candidates are showing up and talking to the students about what matters to them. Once the forums are over, the students will be running nonpartisan registration drives in their schools, as will schools in other parts of the county. It’s our biggest Spring yet, and it’s AFTER a major presidential election. In the fall, we’ll be doing another county-wide effort to dramatically expand again the number of schools participating.
The students who register will be able to vote this year in local elections and the statewide retention election for three Justices on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. In 2026, they will be able to vote for members of Congress, Governor, State Senate, and General Assembly.
Now, what’s the relationship between money and what I just described? It takes funding to do the work.
It takes funding to build a relationship with district officials, educators, and students. It takes skillful staff to coach the school community in coordinating all of this activity, especially for the first time. It takes funding to coach the students about how to research topics that may interest them so they can ask informed questions at a candidate forum.
TRAINING & RESOURCES
When the students hold their nonpartisan drives, it will take more training and coordination with administrators. Students need to learn how to recruit volunteers, fill out a voter registration form, advertise their drive, ask for announcements to be sent home, return forms to election officials, use the state’s online voter registration system, and refer students to other nonpartisan resources like guides.vote, VoteRiders, Vote-411 and the Election Protection hotline 866-OUR-VOTE.
It takes resources to create our incredible state-specific Educator Toolkit for Pennsylvania and other states, which gives teachers everything they need to support their students’ efforts. They’ve been downloaded almost 1,000 times already, simply through word of mouth and our own small network since we don’t have the resources for the kind of campaign that funders should be eager to pay for to achieve wider circulation.
Educators tell us they don’t have good curricular materials on topics like media literacy and the difference between, and appropriate spheres for, partisan and nonpartisan discourse, all of which can help them ground voter registration efforts to existing social studies standards. It takes resources to create and distribute these. It takes resources (in the form of stipends) to give educators the financial wherewithal to take on this added work in addition to what can already be an overwhelming and under-appreciated workload.
Students need resources as well. They need workshops for training. We offer gift cards to incentivize them for training since they often need to give up hours at an after-school job to participate. Students need stickers, pens, clipboards, posters, and candy to encourage their peers to stop by and learn. We pay shipping costs to send them all of this in our beautifully designed Democracy in a Box care package, which takes resources to fulfill.
The exciting thing we saw in 2024 was that our investments since our founding really began to pay off. Our program generated more than 300 high school voter registration drives across 36 states, an increase of 350% over 2022. Students and educators said they wanted more. They send us great photos and videos. They are proud of what they are doing with their friends. And they should be. Organizing a voter registration drive is a real undertaking for anyone, and for high school students to do it for the first time takes commitment and determination. This spring, we’re already up to 54 schools registered to have drives, way ahead of any comparable time in past cycles, including 2024.
DATA
Another thing funding does is fuel our data program, which supports our organizing work. Students and educators, parents and policymakers all are interested in knowing where their community stands compared to others. Many see the numbers and become motivated to get involved and make a change. It’s a shoestring operation right now, as it has been from the start, and we want to make this kind of information available to communities across the country.
Our data model has the capacity to drill down to a hyper-local level. Below you can see registration rates by school district in Allegheny County:
If these maps make you curious about what’s going on in Allegheny County or in your own local area, and if you are beginning to imagine what you might be able to do to help, that’s exactly the idea. We are repeatedly asked for more frequent data and to provide similar data for new areas. It’s one of the ways in which we use funding to build the field as a whole.
WE KNOW OUR PROGRAM WORKS
Our data work also allows us to measure the effectiveness of our programs. In three discrete independent evaluations from the leading expert David Nickerson, communities that held drives through our program increased the voter registration rate for their 18-year-olds more than 6 percentage points more than compared communities without drives.
In the world of voter registration interventions, this is huge. Many studies that are considered great successes tout net increases of just 1 percentage point or even less. What we are building and seeking to institutionalize is much greater than that, and has the potential to become rooted in high schools for good. Our record and the data demonstrate as much.
Young people are turning 18 every day. In Allegheny, they now have a program that is working and should grow. In New Hampshire, Southern California, and Arizona, we have similar programs that need funding to stay alive and keep growing.
Our model is one that can work anywhere. The beauty is that after a few cycles, much less investment will be needed because schools will know how to run the program on their own, with lighter touches of guidance and assessment, and the benefits can continue with minimal costs.
The key ingredient is funders who realize the potential, centering the basic principle that even in 2025, voting and voter registration are core parts of citizenship and that everyone deserves a voice. And it requires those funders making critical commitments that can sustain and grow the work for the long term.
Please consider supporting our efforts:
Allegheny Youth Vote Coalition: Black Political Empowerment Project, Boys and Girls Club of Western PA, Committee of Seventy, League of Women Voters of Greater Pittsburgh, National Council of Jewish Women Pittsburgh, New PA Project, New Voices for Reproductive Justice, PA Youth Vote, The Civics Center, The Urban League of Greater Pittsburgh, Voter Empowerment Education & Empowerment Movement, and the Women and Girls Foundation. Generously funded by The Heinz Endowments.
Is the Civics Center a 501-3 C IRS approved organization? Please let me know. Larry Bogolub LBOGOLUB@comcast.net
Fabulous initiative! Huge kudos to the Civics Center for supporting true civic education and engagement - More of this please!