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AGF is continually celebrating ten years of impact with the Andrew Goodman Vote Everywhere Program. As we reflect on how the program has grown, the Campus Team at the University of Pennsylvania reflected on the past ten years and their hopes for the future of civic engagement on the campus in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 

The University of Pennsylvania has been an Andrew Goodman Vote Everywhere campus since 2015! What barriers to voting existed on campus prior to 2015?

Before 2015, voter outreach at Penn was limited to more individualized initiatives on campus, instead of one centralized organization or system. There was no university-wide messaging or webpage, with our site of vote.upenn.edu being established in 2019 and our campus emails being approved starting in 2022. Additionally, since 2019, we have been an integral part of Penn’s New Student Orientation, creating more centralized engagement from the first experiences of Penn students.

From what you know of how things were in 2015, when it comes to voting and civic engagement on campus, what are some of the most noticeable changes?

One of the most noticeable changes is a significant increase in voter engagement, with a lot more students and student groups recognizing important barriers to voting and actively working towards solving them with the help of Penn Leads the Vote (PLTV). With the onset of PLTV’s engagement efforts post 2015, we have noticed that voter turnout has additionally increased in significant amounts.

How has the general campus’ perception of voting and civic engagement evolved since 2015?

Our campus’ perception of voting and civic engagement was more decentralized in previous years before PLTV’s campus-wide efforts. Through the development of numerous on- and off-campus partnerships, including that with AGF, we have been able to expand our efforts to integrate voter engagement into the college experience at Penn. Now, University-wide messages are sent out standardly on every election day, and multiple Penn faculty are engaged with helping PLTV spread the word about voting. We even have some photos with the Penn president! On a more partnerships-focused note, we have collaborated with the MSSP program and the Communication Neuroscience Lab in 2024 and 2025 to create more civic engagement projects that have data-based foundations.

How has your Campus Team reflected on the legacy of Andrew Goodman, James Earl Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Freedom Summer 1964 over these ten years?

PLTV continues each year to engage student voters and combat apathy by shifting campus culture towards a community who cares about voting. In line with the Freedom Summer, we have specific efforts to engage Black students in voting, through Cultural Resource Center outreach and engaged in diverse coalition building. Our organization supports voting from undergraduate to graduate students, across majors and disciplines from a for students, by students mission. We hope to maintain the legacy of Andrew Goodman, James Earl Chaney, Michael Schwerener, and the Freedom Summer movement through increased efforts to engage students of all backgrounds in being civically motivated.

What are some ways that the Andrew Goodman Vote Everywhere program has supported your efforts on campus to increase voter and civic engagement?

The Andrew Goodman and Vote Everywhere team has been crucial in both brainstorming ideas with our team and helping implement our goals. Through Caroline and the rest of the AGF team, we’ve been connected to numerous resources, campuses, teams, and civic leaders in order to touch base on how to maximize our voter engagement efforts. Without this consistent line of communication, we would not have been able to achieve as many goals as we are proud to talk about today!

What are your hopes and dreams for what civic engagement will look like on campus four years from now?

We have a long-term goal to reach 100% voter registration. While ambitious, we are actively working towards implementing various initiatives that will make this goal achievable. We are connecting with our on and off campus partners to implement more institutionally-sound programs that will make voter registration and turnout an integrated part of being a student at Penn. By 2029, we hope that voting on-campus will be a natural part of the student experience, and that the Penn faculty and institution will support this effort through changes like non-mandatory classes on Election Day and increased promotion of election resources.

What are the team’s main goals to increase and support voter engagement and turnout in 2025?

Our main goals for the 2025 election cycle include both internal and external development to spread the word about voter education and engagement. We have a team of MSSP students working on numerous data-oriented projects to increase our social media presence, determine our impact in terms of historical voting rates, and better understand the data behind the NSLVE reports.

Additionally, we have conducted messaging experiment research with Penn’s Communication Neuroscience lab to illuminate the motivations behind student voting, turning this into belief statements and then persuasive and motivational messages. We plan to utilize these in various messaging campaigns in order to better connect with our student base. We additionally are in the works of creating a preceptorial to present this research as a basis for future collaborative projects with PLTV in the realm of voter engagement data.

In terms of partnerships, we are connecting with various Penn offices in order to increase our campus messaging efforts, including expanding engagement across all 12 graduate schools by targeting voting messages for each academic domain.

Is there anything else you would like to share?

PLTV is very grateful for the wonderful partnership we’ve had with AGF and Vote Everywhere for the past decade. We hope to continue this great work in the future with more exciting projects to come!

Stay tuned as we continue our Campus Connections series, featuring each of our Andrew Goodman Vote Everywhere Campus Teams, the impact made on campus, and how they are living the legacy during this pivotal point in our nation’s history.