Miami Dade College (MDC) is an eight-campus community college with over 100,000 students in Miami-Dade County. MDC students are often first-generation and low-income, they typically both work and go to school, and they generally face a daunting civic empowerment gap. Many MDC students are uncertain about the details and implications of voting. They are often insecure about their level of knowledge, and they overestimate the difficulty of voting. A large portion of MDC students simply don’t view themselves as “voters” and aren’t aware of the link between voting and their everyday lives.

MDC’s Institute for Civic Engagement & Democracy’s nonpartisan voter engagement programming aims to address these barriers and contribute to student success by helping MDC students become informed, engaged voters and citizens. In other words, MDC aims to help students bridge the civic empowerment gap.

For the last decade, MDC has had its own election readiness website: a one-stop site with everything MDC students need to be election ready–from registering to vote, to checking voter registration status, to signing up to be a poll worker, to breaking down four simple steps to be ready to vote, and more. MDC updated the website in Spring 2024 and continued to update the site as the November elections approached,. working tirelessly to promote the website through faculty, the college’s marketing and communications department, student affairs, and hard work by the Institute for Civic Engagement & Democracy team across MDC’s eight campuses. This resulted in over 37,000 unique views of the mdc.edu/vote page between May 1 to November 5, 2024. And through MDC’s partnership with the SLSV Coalition and Civic Nation’s ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, MDC was able to integrate a voter registration portal into its mdc.edu/vote site.

In fact, partnerships play a crucial role in all of MDC’s efforts. The college’s nonpartisan civic engagement team collaborates closely with MDC’s local Supervisor of Elections, who provides essential support in helping the civic engagement team understand and comply with local election policy while providing transparency into the voting process that MDC can, in turn, pass along to its campus community.

MDC’s civic engagement team also works very closely with a local non-profit, Engage Miami, that has provided staff, funding, and support to implement all of its nonpartisan voter engagement programming. Additionally, MDC has engaged in extensive work promoting paid poll worker positions, and those promotional efforts also drove traffic to our website. Finally, as a community college that is home to an extraordinary breadth of student backgrounds and circumstances, MDC focused significant efforts on its faculty, holding workshops for professors on how to help their students be election-ready, and conducting hundreds of class presentations. MDC organized its efforts around the Civic Holidays, holding more than 30 events across the college and celebrating National Voter Registration Day, National Voter Education Week, Vote Early Day, and Election Hero Day.

As a community college, MDC could always use more staff and more funds, and more time above all! However, by recruiting and empowering students to implement its nonpartisan voter engagement programming with their peers, MDC found an effective strategy to overcome limited resources and urgent challenges. With their support and thanks to partnerships with Ask Every Student, the Andrew Goodman Foundation, the Fair Election Center’s Campus Vote Project, the SLSV Coalition, Civic Nation, and the Election Assistance Commission, MDC is confident its students have everything they need to bridge their civic empowerment gap and realize their identities as lifelong voters.