GoVoteNYC grantees launch week of events to engage underrepresented voters
In honor of National Voter Registration Day this year, GoVoteNYC grantees organized a week of civic engagement events across the city, aimed at mobilizing underrepresented voters.
The New York-based donor collaboration awards millions of dollars in grants to nonprofits across the five boroughs to aid their grassroots efforts.
“We have 8 million people [in NYC], and a lot of them are eligible to vote, and a lot of them need help.” said Eve Stotland, Senior Program Officer at The New York Community Trust, one of the oldest and largest community foundations in the U.S. “We hope that we’re getting at a lot of different voting populations and that we’re funding groups that are trusted messengers in their community, and that know how to get their message across in a persuasive way to people who are often left out of the political process — always in a nonpartisan way.”
Faith in New York, a network of multifaith communities, is one of those funded organizations/grantees. Earlier this week, they held a voter registration event outside Harlem Hospital on 137th Street, later moving over to the Schomburg Center on Malcolm X Blvd.
“We just come out and put [out] hard copies of the applications to make them available,” said Marilyn Joseph, Director of Organizing at Faith in New York. “We also use technology [to ensure] that if we need to check someone’s registration, we can do that as well. It’s our goal to make it as easy as possible for folks to register.”
Leah Mallory photos
With a table full of registration materials set up and determined mindsets, the Faith in New York members approached people on the street, informing them of the upcoming election and inviting them to update their information and even register for the first time.
Drew Smith, 62, approached the table. He said he hadn’t voted in almost a decade.
“It was easier this time because they were right there,” he said, referring to the process of registering as he updated his information.
Joseph spoke on the long-term goals of faith in New York as a recipient of GoVoteNYC funding.
“We want to tap into our Black and Brown communities, particularly because we know that we’ve seen low propensity turnout,” she said. “And so we want to change that paradigm. We want to make sure that our community is informed.”
GoVoteNYC Director Neill Coleman reiterated that message, explaining that by funding trusted messengers within communities with traditionally low voter turnout, those who are typically not engaged become involved, thereby increasing voter turnout.
“Political campaigns tend to ignore those voters; they tend to concentrate on voters who are regular voters in the sense that they regularly vote,” he said. “But it’s important to also engage people who maybe don’t vote so often because they usually have their reasons why they’re not voting. And so, the grantees that GoVoteNYC is supporting are able to really engage in these sorts of relational conversations about voting.”
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