Get Your Nonpartisan Voter Guides
Our friends at the Campus Election Engagement Project have created a series of nonpartisan voter guides for most of the big Senate and Gubernatorial races around the country. The guides combine data from Project Vote Smart and other reliable sources to show you where the candidates stand on a variety of important issues.
These guides are a great tool for your get-out-the-vote efforts. One reason that many students give for choosing not to vote is because they feel like they don't know enough about the candidates to make an informed choice. Handing out these voter guides is one way to help them find the information they need.
You can download the guides for your state from the CEEP website.
Bring Us to Your Campus
It's still early in the fall, but we're already starting to set our training schedule for the winter and spring. Now's a great time to start thinking about bringing us to your campus next term.
Some of the services we can provide for your student government include:
Retreats - We can facilitate a retreat to help your student government prepare for the spring term. We'll help you brainstorm ideas, come up with strategies, and flesh out a detailed action plan.
Skills Trainings - Your members don't always come to student government with all of the tools they need to be successful. We can come train them on key skills like how to run effective committee meetings, how to plan a big event, and how to do effective publicity.
Lobby Days - The spring is when many state legislatures make decisions about higher education funding and other critical issues. We can help you plan and carry out a lobby day at the state house so that students from your campus can speak directly to decision makers.
Campaign Trainings - We can help you plan your big projects for the spring and give you the skills to carry them out. Whether you plan to tackle financial aid funding or sexual assault prevention or campus sustainability, we can set you up to succeed.
Please contact us today to get more information on our services and what we can do for you.
Get Our Student Vote Toolkit
The election is just two months away, which means that voter registration season is upon us.
That's why we've published our new Student Vote toolkit for student governments, which explains the ins and outs of how to run an effective nonpartisan voter registration and get-out-the-vote drive on your campus.
The toolkit is based on the experience of the Student Government Resource Center and our partners working on hundreds of campuses in recent election cycles. We hope you'll find these resources as useful as we have.
We've also included chapters on how to build a coalition, generate visibility, work with the local election registrar, and more.
Download the PDF today and share it with the rest of your student government.
Voter Registration for the 21st Century
The first big wave of colleges and universities started classes this week. And since it's an even-numbered year, that also means that it's the beginning of voter registration season on campus.
Lots of student governments run voter registration drives, but many don't know how to incorporate online voter registration into their efforts. It's time for that to change.
That's why we're helping student governments this fall to add online tactics into their voter registration drives using StudentVote.org.Read more
Leadership Opportunities for Campus Women
Our friends at AAUW (the American Association of University Women) are hosting a webinar about campus-based leadership programs for women on Tuesday, August 19th, at 2:30 and 7 p.m. EDT. On this call, students can get an inside look at the following programs:
- Elect Her - Campus Women Win: A program that encourages and trains college women to run for student government on their campuses to build the pipeline of women running for office.
- The National Student Advisory Council: A yearlong leadership program for 10 college women who serve as AAUW ambassadors on their campuses. These students build relationships with local branches, lead campus events that promote women’s equity, and help plan and implement National Conference for College Women Student Leaders (NCCWSL) activities.
- Campus Action Project (CAP) Grants: Campus Action Projects are annual, grant-funded, student-led projects that put AAUW’s latest research into action. This year’s program is sponsored by Pantene and focuses on stereotypes and biases.
Tips from an Outgoing SGA President
With the academic year coming to an end, we took this opportunity to interview Samantha Zwerling about her experience serving for the past two years as the president of the University of Maryland Student Government Association.
How did you get involved in the UMD Student Government?
When I came to college, I was looking for an environmental student group to join, so I got involved with MaryPIRG. MaryPIRG's funding was very dependent on their relationship with the SGA, so I started attending every SGA meeting. I became the Chapter Chair of MaryPIRG at the end of my sophomore year, and continued to work with the SGA. At the end of that year, I thought that I could make a big impact on the SGA and decided to run for president.Read more
NCLC's Annual Summit in DC
The National Campus Leadership Council holds an annual Summit in Washington, D.C., that brings together incoming and outgoing student body presidents to tackle major issues affecting our generation. More than 100 student leaders will convene in the nation’s capital to connect and set a course for strategic action over the coming year.
Over the last two Summits, more than 200 student body presidents have convened to build a strong community of student leaders that has spread innovative campus initiatives and provided critical leadership on national policy debates. NCLC empowers student leaders to make a meaningful impact on issues like student debt, youth jobs, and campus safety.
This year's Summit is coming up in a few weeks, so time is running out to register. Learn more here.
The Big Event at Texas A&M
The Big Event is a community service event where college students spend a day completing volunteer projects for local residents as a way to say "Thank You" to the community. The event started at Texas A&M University and has now spread to over 100 colleges nationwide. Dozens of student governments organize The Big Event each year as one of their largest service programs.
We interviewed William Nereson, the director of The Big Event at Texas A&M, to find out more about this project.
Please tell us a little bit about who you are: your role with The Big Event, your year, your major, any other background info you’d like to share.
I am an Industrial Distribution major from Boerne, Texas, and a member of the Class of 2014. I have a twin brother. I have had the opportunity to be involved with The Big Event for all four years of college. I started my time in The Big Event as a Staff Assistant. For this year, I have served as the Director of The Big Event.
What is The Big Event? How did the event go in 2014?
The Big Event is the largest student-run service project in the nation. We had 20,503 students participate in The Big Event at Texas A&M in 2014. They completed almost 2,036 jobs in the community.Read more
Bring Our Student Vote Training to Your Campus
It may not seem like it, but the 2014 elections are right around the corner. It's time to start planning your fall election projects now.
Mobilizing students to vote is one of the best ways that you can strengthen the student voice. If college students want their voices heard by elected officials, they need to turn out at the polls.
That's why we've partnered with the Student PIRGs’ New Voters Project to provide the nation’s premier nonpartisan training on how to run effective campus voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives. The New Voters Project is the nation’s leading nonpartisan young voter mobilization program. Since 1983, they have helped to register more than 1.2 million young voters and make more than a million personalized get-out-the-vote contacts.Read more
For Your Reading List
For any student government leaders who have ever been frustrated by the challenge of mobilizing your fellow students (and we're betting that's all of you), we have a recommendation for your reading list: the new edition of "The Impossible Will Take a Little While: Perseverance and Hope in Troubled Times" by Paul Loeb.
The book brings together the voices of eloquent writers to talk about how they replenish the wells of commitment, exploring what keeps them going in the face of constant challenges. Some essays address our current political time, from memoirs of the Arab Spring to dispatches from the environmental movement. Others examine how people persisted in past struggles that could easily have been deemed unwinnable: what it was like to confront South African apartheid, Eastern European dictatorships, Mississippi’s entrenched segregation, or the bigotry that kept gays silent and closeted.Read more