The Students Learn Students Vote (SLSV) Coalition, the nationwide nonpartisan network dedicated to growing college student voter turnout, released today Coalition-wide goals for 2023 that lay out a unified set of objectives and priorities for the more than 400 national, state, and local Coalition partners who work with nearly 2000 college campuses in all 50 states.
The goals are developed through a collaborative effort with hundreds of Coalition partners, the SLSV team, Executive Committee, and Advisory Board. They aim to build momentum for the 2024 federal election cycle while sustaining historic college student turnout gains made in 2018, and 2020, as well as remarkable progress in 2022 – a year in which:
- More colleges and universities than ever participated in national programs to support campus-level efforts to grow student voter engagement.
- The U.S. Department of Education provided direct support for college and university efforts on student voter registration with a Dear Colleague Letter to institutions throughout the country.
- The SLSV Coalition and partners collaborated to establish an unprecedented effort to bolster rigorous academic research on student voting, through the Student Voting Research Network.
While 2023 is not a federal election year, there are no “off” years when it comes to institutionalizing and investing in the future of our democracy. In the coming year, the SLSV Coalition will work together to build on the #StudentVote movement’s extraordinary growth with a focus on the following priorities:
- Deepening engagement to support campuses in implementing advanced nonpartisan student voter engagement strategies.
- Continuing to support campuses as they complete the SLSV Checklist – including and especially during non-federal-election years, personnel transitions, and assessments via Tufts University’s Institute for Democracy & Higher Education’s National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE).
- Working with local, state, and national nonprofit partners to coordinate support for campuses to meet their needs without overwhelming them.
“This year’s goals reflect a new and exciting phase for our Coalition,” said SLSV Coalition Co-Founder and Executive Director Clarissa Unger. “We’ve seen such extraordinary growth and progress since our founding in 2016, to the point that we’re moving beyond the work of establishing a movement, to pursuing strategies that deepen engagement and further institutionalize nonpartisan voter engagement on college campuses throughout the country.”
The SLSV Coalition’s goals guide the #StudentVote movement’s work as a whole and serve as a pathway for achieving our collective vision that every college student has easy and equal access to participate in every election, facilitated and encouraged by their institutions of higher education. Coalition-wide goals are always grounded in a commitment to racial justice and working toward a more equitable democracy.
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The SLSV Coalition is the national hub and largest nonpartisan network in the United States dedicated to increasing college student voter participation. The Coalition convenes and connects partners, campuses, and students with each other and with resources and programming towards achieving a vision of ensuring that every student has easy and equal access to participate in every election. They use data, relationships, celebration, and easy-to-follow planning structures, to help campus and local leaders register and turnout more student voters every year. The SLSV Coalition is a project of NEO Philanthropy. NEO Philanthropy is strictly nonpartisan, and does not support or oppose any candidate or party.
