SFSTL Voter Engagement Interns Kayla Sullivan (far left) and Asia Parson (far right) with fellow Black Organizing Summer School (BOSS) participants.
A voter engagement movement is growing in St. Louis, Missouri, and the Scholarship Foundation of St. Louis, an NCAN member, and grassroots racial justice organization Action St. Louis are taking part in it.
The Scholarship Foundation of St. Louis (SFSTL) is a nonprofit organization that aims to provide access to postsecondary education for community members who don’t have the financial resources to pursue their education goals. By expanding these opportunities
for St. Louis’s residents, they hope to develop an educated community that can sustain a healthy democracy.
With this big picture goal for democracy in mind, SFSTL partnered with Action St. Louis to pilot a voter engagement internship, an opportunity to shape brilliant college students
into civic engagement leaders who will educate and strengthen the political analysis skills of the St. Louis community. The internship is supported by donor Robert Brunk, a former community organizer invested in empowering the youth—who he worries
have become disconnected from the political process—to become leaders and protect the vote.
SFSTL Executive Director Faith Sandler explained that the idea for this internship started as a simple exploratory conversation with Brunk about advocacy and developed into a movement for meaningful voter education and participation. The in-depth story
of how their paths crossed can be found in Sandler’s newsletter, Words of Faith.
Upon starting her role in 2021 as SFSTL’s Director of Advocacy, Karina Arango recalled that the foundation was looking for a way to evolve its work by mobilizing young people to be active in their own advocacy. While the idea of SFSTL participating in
voter engagement was not initially within their scope, having the encouragement of Brunk allowed the foundation to pilot the internship.
“What we really are striving to do in the internship is to strengthen folks’ minds and strengthen their civic engagement in politics,” Arango explained. By introducing folks to activities that will sharpen their political analysis skills, they hope that
more people will be better equipped to navigate the political system. More importantly, by giving the younger generation the knowledge to organize and educate their community, the next generation of leaders will have a greater and deeper impact on
society.
To execute the foundation’s vision for the internship program, they needed to partner with a local organization that would bring in new expertise on community organizing. Action St. Louis would prove to be the perfect fit for the role. As a racial justice
organization, Action St. Louis focuses on seeking and building political power for Black communities in St. Louis. With the support of the donors and Action STL, the voter engagement internship launched in June 2022 with its first two interns,
Kayla Sullivan and Asia Parson.
Laying the groundwork
The interns were guided through Action STL’s training program called BOSS, or Black Organizing Summer School, where they learned about grassroots organizing from experienced local leaders, ensuring
that the knowledge they are taught is authentic to their community. In addition to community organizing and outreach, the interns are conducting research with Arango on local policy issues that are of importance to them individually. Housing policy,
tenants’ rights, education policy, voting rights, and the “intersection of economic and educational justice” are just a sampling of the topics that the interns are researching.
“As an African American, my race has been historically subjected to voter injustice, and being able to inform my own community about voting practices so that they learn about how to take action and subsequently create change is significant work to me,”
Sullivan, a second-year doctoral candidate at the Washington University at St. Louis, stated in her internship application. “This form of community work assists in combating historically oppressive systems and practices associated with voting.”
The behind-the-scenes research in combination with hands-on direct action allows the interns to genuinely understand, identify with, and activate their community. Using their newly acquired skills, they engage with and educate folks on local issues to
prepare voters to be informed enough to cast their vote in the upcoming elections.
“In 2020 I was finally old enough to cast my vote in a presidential election,” Parson, an incoming graduate student at the Florida Institute of Technology, stated in her application. “It was a great feeling of power, like my opinion mattered, like I could
help make a difference. It was my first time voting even though I had been 18 for 2 years and could have voted in previous elections. I realized that my peers never talked about those elections or bothered going out. If I feel so great casting my
ballot during the presidential election, why don’t I exercise my right to vote during other elections? I want people to understand the importance of their vote, regardless of what election it is. Everyone deserves a right to vote, and for their opinion
to be heard.”
Spreading knowledge and inspiring change
One major takeaway that Arango hopes to convey to the interns and the community through this program is that voting gives people the power to hire and fire the people that are elected to explicitly serve their needs. Looking at it from a college attainment
perspective, voting gives students a say in who represents them at the local, state, and federal levels.
“[Voting] does impact the student experience, it does impact access, it does impact what we think of justice,” Arango said. “We want to ensure that the folks representing us also are thinking about justice [and] thinking about the well-being of the students
that we care about and serve.”
While the voter engagement internship is still in its pilot phase, the foundation hopes to continue developing it and potentially making it one of the many key facets of their organization once they are more comfortable within the area.
“The well-being of all of us is vested in educational access and engagement of folks in civic and civil society,” Sandler added. “A fantastic outcome of our advocacy work would be more younger voters engaged, more folks showing up at community meetings
and hearings to express their viewpoint and their needs on campus, petitioning of the trustees to change policies that affect students... Those are all things that would be as important as any particular legislative matter.”
For organizations that are inspired by SFSTL’s mobilization of voters, Sandler and Arango shared helpful advice to help you begin mobilizing your young voters for the upcoming elections.
Define how voter engagement will serve your mission. Understand why and how it will serve your organization’s purpose.
Find the experts in your community who can help you accomplish your goal. Find people who are already experts in what you need to know and can expand your organization’s skillsets.
Young people already carry power, they just need empowerment and a sense of safety to activate their strengths. “It’s not everyone’s job at the organization to empower, but it is everyone’s job to ensure that young people have the
space—when they are ready—to step into that power,” Arango said. “Young people are already powerful before they enter a classroom, before they become an intern, before they’re with organizations—they already have power. Often, what they’re looking
for...is safety to activate that.”
Keep the movement authentic and give youth the platform to voice their concerns and needs. “We can learn so much from young people [by] simply hearing what they care about and what has impacted them,” Arango said.
“If there was ever a time to be courageous, it’s now,” Sandler concluded. “If any organization has an interest, they need to understand that they should be acting on that interest because every one of their current and future students is depending upon
a world they can actually live in and contribute to. Voter work is now or never.”
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