By Natalie Festa, CCL Student Staff
This election year, many organizations, politicians, and community leaders have called for increased advocacy measures to improve voter turnout and civic engagement across the United States. Despite the enduring threat of COVID-19, Harris County, the third-largest county in the nation, broke its all-time voter turnout record last Thursday with one day left of early voting, exceeding the 1.34 million-voter record set by the 2016 election. Many pushes have been made to improve voter turnout in the county and Houston community—Rice students have been at the forefront of these efforts. On October 21, the Center for Civic Leadership hosted the Owls Mobilizing Houston Event, where ten student groups shared the projects they have been working on to engage the Rice and Houston community in the election. These students have been working since the early summer to address topics related to voter mobilization, racial justice, the 2020 Census, and the intersections of these issues.
At the event, students discussed their project goals and reflections with faculty and staff, project mentors, and donors. In accordance with the event, these initiatives have brought together a conglomeration of partnerships; from internal advising within the CCL and project mentors, to external collaboration with community stakeholders and experts, these projects have depended on a diverse array of perspectives. In addition, the Rich Family Endowment has provided the financial support necessary to make many of these projects a reality.
Sam Holloway, a student leader working on a project to address the impact of COVID-19 on communities disproportionately exposed to air pollution, reflected on the impacts of this collaborative process: “Our mentorship through the CCL as well as [our research] partnerships have led us to realize that this grant and the work we're doing doesn't end here…there are opportunities to continue our involvement with this research group and to contribute productively to further events down the line. The support we have received financially and institutionally has absolutely enabled us to do that in a way we could never have done otherwise."
Perhaps what is most unique about these initiatives is that their goals are both individual and collective, specific in their populations and issues of interest, yet far-reaching in their community impacts. Projects have spanned many facets of civic engagement. The “Voting is Cool” project has aimed to increase voter registration among underrepresented populations in Houston. Another project created a youth informational magazine that provides an outlet for high school students to express their political concerns and learn about the actions they can take to be civically engaged. Other projects are looking to better understand the prison to deportation pipeline in Houston, or to research means of increasing Census completion among patients in the Harris County Health System. Expertise in these issues has come from community partners such as Mi Familia Vota, BLM Houston and LINK Houston, who have helped students better understand the communities they hope to address and have provided support to students in reaching out to those communities.
In their reflections, many student leaders shared that some of the most transformative parts of their projects involved the participation and mentorship of students not yet of voting age. “This was absolutely worth it,” states Carolyn Daly, Vice President of Civic Duty Rice and a student leader for the Houston Youth Voters Conference, “High schoolers have been the main attendees at our conferences and are super excited about getting involved in the political process.” Diego Degenhart, another student leader, concludes, “This project has been fulfilling in terms of seeing the impacts on these students and being able to have these mentorship relationships…it has definitely worked extremely well in allowing us to build the next generation of leaders.”