Empowering Our Youth to Strengthen Our Democracy
2022 No. 16
Greetings!
Even as we celebrate the second-highest turnout among voters under 30 in the past three decades, we know we need to do still MORE to engage young people in politics. Our future depends on it! Students for Justice turns ordinary college students into passionate voters and advocates for voting. None of our interns will ever take democracy for granted.

Our fall internship session ended with a celebratory meeting on November 9 and then we immediately started preparing for an extraordinary special internship session focused on the Georgia runoff election. Read on to learn about both efforts.
Our 80 fall interns recruited almost 800 volunteers – most of them fellow college students – to write postcards and make phone calls to voters. Together, the interns and their volunteers distributed more than 18,000 postcards and spent over 1,000 hours making phone calls to provide voters with information about when and where to vote.
The interns also benefited from an eight-week course in digital marketing skills during which they studied survey data showing the top reasons young people give for not voting and then created social media posts to address each of those reasons. In the process, they became ambassadors for voting in their
own communities. We heard many stories about their efforts to persuade reluctant peers to vote! They told us that the barriers to youth voting that our data revealed were manifested in their everyday conversations all the time and that they were delighted to have effective responses ready.
For the Georgia runoff, we have recruited 75 Students for Justice alumni representing all six of our internship sessions – spanning summer 2020 through fall 2022 – for a massive get-out-the-vote effort. Thanks to a group of generous donors, we can pay them for their work. Of those former interns who have stepped up, 62 have pledged to do well over 500 hours of phone
banking between November 17 and December 6. We expect them to reach at least 25,000 voters in that time.
At the same time, 33 of the former interns have stepped up to create social media targeted at potential youth voters in Georgia. These interns are all digital marketing experts acquainted with youth voting attitudes thanks to their experience in one of our 2022 sessions, and they are ready to hit the ground running.
To give you an idea of the impressive quality of the work our interns do on social media, click the picture below to see one of the highest-performing TikToks of the fall session, created by intern Lekira Moore, a student at North Carolina A&T:
Working with these passionate, creative, smart, and dedicated college students gives us tremendous hope for the future of our country. Our interns are the engaged citizens and political leaders of tomorrow, and we are so lucky to know them!
With hope for our democracy,
Claire Ullman & Sandra Radoff
Co-Directors
Help us find opportunities for our former interns!
We work hard to make Students for Justice a career stepping stone for our interns. One of the ways we do this is by sharing job and internship opportunities with our program alumni. If you know of an opportunity for current college students or recent graduates, in any field, please email us to let us know about it so we can share it with our intern community. You might even consider having one of our former interns work for you this summer!
Want to make a difference?
The ongoing success of the internship program has been made possible largely by the Zoom house parties we've been organizing (more than 50 since Spring 2021!) Thank you to our AMAZING house party hosts for pulling their friends, co-workers, neighbors, and families together to educate people about the program and how they can engage in its on-going growth and success. To learn more about hosting or co-hosting a virtual party, please email Deb Wachspress, Development Director, at deb@studentsforjusticevote.org.

Help us reach more people! Please forward this newsletter to everyone you know who might want to help young people save our democracy.
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