BACKGROUND
From June 21-24 2024, GenVote convened the first youth-led Electoral Justice Summit in the United States. In Phoenix, Arizona, we convened 85 Gen-Z and millennial leaders from over 35 state and national youth organizations to reflect on the state of the youth and democracy movements, understand structural challenges facing our democracy including authoritarian attempts to take over our elections and suppress the vote of young people, and lay the foundation for a generational vision for a just democracy for all.
At this invite-only convening, we created space for young leaders to discuss and debate electoral justice ideas that can expand the franchise for generations and reimagine how young people come of age in a truly multiracial democracy. This new electoral justice framework will lay the foundation for our advocacy at the national and local level, and can unite our movements with a shared, bold vision of a just democracy for all. Most importantly, the inaugural “Our Generation’s Electoral Justice Summit” strengthened new and existing relationships amongst organizations and sparked the creation for a first-of-its-kind youth-led electoral justice alliance of democracy and social justice organizations.
PURPOSE
Following the immensely successful Our Generation’s Electoral Justice Summit and in the lead-up to the 2024 election, Generation Vote will invite the participants of the inaugural Summit to continue the momentum from the Summit and spark a new youth-led Electoral Justice Alliance.
The Youth Electoral Justice Alliance will be a cross-movement, national community of c(3) and c(4) organizations across the democracy, youth, social justice movements to raise the stakes of our generation’s democratic crisis and popularize “electoral justice” through legislative demands, direct action and narrative change.
OUR THEORY OF CHANGE
Our theory of change is rooted in building people power through a multiracial, cross-sectoral movement of young people (ages 16-35) fed up by our outdated electoral systems, impacted by voter suppression, and ready to reimagine a truly just democracy for all in the United States. We will convene not just college-based organizations, but build relationships within an intergenerational movement of Gen Z and millennial democracy activists, college and high school-aged students, social justice leaders, state and national nonprofit partners, labor organizers and philanthropic partners. To make our vision a reality, we will create a hub for Electoral Justice Alliance partners to mobilize national direct actions, build legislative power for electoral justice policies and change the narrative of what it means for young people to fight for democracy at the national, state and local level.
We will mobilize the Alliance to strategize with partners like the Democracy for American Democracy Coalition to show Congress our generation’s support for sweeping policies that protect our freedom to vote like the Freedom to Vote Act, John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act, D.C. Statehood and the Native American Voting Rights Act. But we will not stop there. We will offer a framework of electoral justice ideas that can address the structural flaws of our political system and why our generation must envision a transformative path to rebuild our democracy for all.
Our role here is to create a framework and vision for our democracy that other people and allied organizations can see themselves in, since we are part of a larger movement to ensure that every American has the freedom to vote and participate in the electoral process. This larger movement of voter advocacy and campus-based organizations have applied direct pressure on elected officials to support major federal reforms and push back against voter suppression laws on the state level. What is missing is a mass youth-led movement that uses creative, disruptive tactics and mass training to deeply engage young supporters and generate stories about support for electoral justice in our communities.
PROPOSED NEXT STEPS
The Youth Electoral Justice Alliance will launch in September 2024 with a kick-off virtual call and will be open to participating organizations from the inaugural Our Generation’s Electoral Justice Summit and aligned youth movement partners. The Alliance will meet monthly on virtual calls and participate in annual or biennial in-person national Youth Electoral Justice Summits.
September 2024 - November 2024: To flex the Alliance’s muscle for collaboration and resource-sharing, the Youth Electoral Justice Alliance will be invited to participate in the 2024 “Count on Us” campaign. Co-hosted by fellow Youth Electoral Justice Alliance members - Generation Vote, March for Our Lives and Get Free - the “Count on Us” campaign will mobilize young voters to the polls with a shared narrative about the election on our generation’s terms, support election defense, and prepare to enact post-election plans to ensure every vote is counted in case there are attempts to overturn the 2024 election. Joint actions leading up to the election included phone/text-banks, messaging coordination/training, public pledge campaigns to “count every vote”, sustained actions at high profile polling sites in key states, and plans for a youth strike if Trump violates the democratic process.
October 2024: At the 1st-of-its-kind Our Generation’s Electoral Justice Summit, we created space for participants to define “electoral justice” and share ideas that can reimagine how future generations come of age in a truly multiracial democracy and expand the franchise for generations to come. This laid the foundation for a new progressive youth-led electoral justice platform that can transform our democracy, unite our movements with a bold vision for a just democracy for all, and guide our advocacy at the national and local level. During a critical election year where the future of our democracy is at stake, we will publish this youth-led electoral justice platform in October to relay a vision for our democracy in the lead-up to the 2024 general election and beyond.
October 2024 - February 2025: Lay the groundwork for a national youth-led direct action to win federal reform that can address our nation’s democratic crisis at the scale that we need in 2025. Should we have a pro-democracy trifecta in the next Congress, we believe the youth movement's strength in civil resistance and movement-building (online and IRL) can play a major role in advancing common-sense federal democracy reforms as a day 1 priority in the next Congress.
This is just the beginning of a generational electoral justice project to unite the youth movement around the single issue that ties all of us together: protecting our freedom to vote on issues that our generation cares about and reimagining our democracy for future generations of young people.
Join us by signing up here: