This is a guide designed to help faculty, staff, students, and other campus stakeholders write strong action plans to increase nonpartisan civic learning, political engagement, and voter participation on college and university campuses. It provides a framework for developing and documenting institutional goals and strategies for fostering a civic ethos on campus and institutionalizing elements of democratic engagement into the curriculum and co-curriculum that persist regardless of election cycles. This guide is not meant to be prescriptive and should be adapted to your institutional context.
Completing the action planning process can help an institution assess current efforts, set short-term and long-term goals, plan and implement strategies and tactics, assess progress towards goals, and continuously work to improve democratic engagement efforts. This work can and should be collaborative and occur in a team setting. Depending on the campus, this may be accomplished in a committee, coalition, task force, or working group. The hope is that through this process, the institution will be able to garner additional support and resources, change culture, improve systems and policies, build lasting capacity, and ultimately institutionalize efforts.
This 2025 edition was includes new guidance on navigating policy and regulatory challenges. It provides updated support for using the guide and assessing progress via a rubric, additional resources from the SLSV Coalition Resource Library, and guidance on meeting state requirements such as those in California, Maryland, and Minnesota regarding campus action planning. The guide aims to complement these state requirements while providing holistic, nonpartisan student-centered approaches to advance campus civic culture.