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6 minute read
Civic engagement is a vital part of building stronger, more connected communities. From volunteering your time to advocating for meaningful causes, there are numerous ways to be civically engaged. One of the most impactful forms of civic engagement beyond voting is through skills-based volunteering, where you leverage your unique talents to support organizations and projects that matter. This approach benefits both the community and you, as it fosters professional growth while driving social change.
The benefits of skills-based volunteering are immense. Whether you're leading a civic engagement project or participating in various civic engagement activities, you're contributing to the larger goal of empowering communities. In addition, skills-based volunteer opportunities offer a structured way to get involved, allowing volunteers to engage in meaningful work that aligns with their personal and professional goals.
Why civic engagement matters
So, why is civic engagement important? Civic engagement ensures that individuals are actively participating in the life of their communities, whether through voting, volunteering, or other acts of civic engagement. There are many types of civic engagement, but volunteering stands out as one of the most accessible and impactful. By offering your skills, you can create long-lasting change, whether you're helping youth, supporting environmental causes, or contributing to community development.
Through a skills-based volunteer program and skills-based volunteer software like Catchafire, volunteers can easily connect with civic engagement organizations to support various initiatives. The benefits of civic engagement are wide-reaching—from improving social cohesion to fostering a sense of personal responsibility. Whether you’re looking for civic engagement ideas or want to engage youth in meaningful ways, the opportunity to contribute through skills-based volunteering is more important than ever.
Civic engagement organizations: nonprofit spotlight
We spoke to three nonprofits on Catchafire doing vital civic engagement work in their communities. Read on to learn more about their mission, their voter engagement work, and how you can get involved.
Missouri Voter Protection Coalition
We spoke with Daphne Singer, Law Clerk at Missouri Voter Protection Coalition (MOVPC) about the organization’s vital work to expand voting access.
Tell us about your organization and how you got started. What inspired the founding of your organization, and how has it evolved to address civic participation and voter engagement?
Since 2006, MOVPC and its partners have worked to dismantle discriminatory voting barriers and expand access to the ballot, with a particular focus on low-income, communities of color, young voters, seniors, voters with disabilities, language minorities, and other marginalized voters.
Share your organization's mission and the specific civic engagement initiatives you focus on.
MOVPC is a non-partisan statewide network of advocates who collaborate to advance free, fair, and accessible elections in Missouri and build a pro-democracy movement rooted in civil rights movement building.
Missouri Voter Protection Coalition brings its recognized policy expertise to lead policy, legal, and education campaigns alongside approximately 60 Missouri organizations representing thousands of voters, serving as a hub for voting rights work in Missouri and a connector to national voting rights campaigns.
How has Catchafire helped you transform civic participation in your community?
Catchafire did all of our branding which helps us reach new voters.
What innovative approaches does your organization take to engage with the community to promote civic participation? What have been some of your most impactful initiatives to date?
MOVPC engages with our coalition of local community-based organizations to engage with Missouri's citizens about their right to vote. We are proactive in setting up voter registration tables in underserved communities, advocating for marginalized communities to election board officials and engaging in impact litigation.
What are some of the biggest challenges your organization faces in promoting civic engagement?
One of the biggest challenges we face is in reaching underserved voters. Marketing-- and a budget for marketing-- is a hugely important element, and one that costs a lot of money to directly target those most affected by regulations.
How can skills-based volunteers help further your mission and goals during this year's election cycle?
Volunteers who train in voter registration and poll protection help on and before election day getting people registered and ensuring they have access to free, fair, and equitable elections.
Get involved by viewing open projects and donating to MOVPC.
“Voting is the greatest power individuals have to engage with the political process and make their voices heard. It is a right that has been hard fought for centuries, and one that must be defended against attempts to curtail people's ability to make change.”
Daphne Singer, Law Clerk
The Voter Network
"The people who don’t vote happen to be the same people with the poorest health outcomes in Kansas, and while correlation doesn’t necessarily equal causation, the overlap is dramatic.”
Lindsay Ford, Executive Director
The Voter Network
Tell us about your organization and how you got started. What inspired the founding of your organization, and how has it evolved to address civic participation and voter engagement?
With the support of health foundations interested in closing the participation gap, The Voter Network has been working on groundbreaking voter engagement strategies that have seen an outsized impact on turnout among unlikely voters. Through increased participation in the electoral process, we aim to improve the health of Kansans.
Share your organization's mission and the specific civic engagement initiatives you focus on.
The Voter Network is dedicated to creating a culture of informed, enthusiastic Kansas voters, specifically in communities that have faced systemic barriers in the political process. We do this through our groundbreaking relational voter turnout efforts, and by providing reliable, nonpartisan election resources, in both English and Spanish, to voters across Kansas. We also maintain two websites, KSBallot.org and KSBoleta.org, where Kansas voters can find nonpartisan information about the candidates and issues on their ballots, as well guides for voting early and addresses for polling locations and drop boxes.
What innovative approaches does your organization take to engage with the community to promote civic participation? What have been some of your most impactful initiatives to date?
Our work is guided by our belief that we aren’t, in most cases, the right people to communicate with voters. The most persuasive conversations happen in our churches, with our doctors, between neighbors, and in other spaces where trust has been established. To that end, we address voting disparities by offering cutting-edge technology and programming to messengers and organizations that haven’t traditionally had access to data-driven electoral tools.
Our cornerstone effort, Voter to Voter, is a nonpartisan peer-to-peer voter turnout effort. Voter to Voter is not only the largest relational effort in Kansas, but is also operating on a scale competitive with other relational movements across the nation. We are currently working with more than 2,000 volunteer election ambassadors who are connecting with tens of thousands of voters across the state. Year after year, turnout among voters contacted by a Voter to Voter volunteer election ambassadors is 20% higher than statewide averages.
What are some of the biggest challenges your organization faces in promoting civic engagement?
As a smaller, newer organization, we often struggle to find the capacity to publicly promote our civic engagement activities consistently. With staff laser focused on program management, volunteer coordination, and partner collaboration, finding time to build out social media calendars, design graphics, and strategize effective ways to engage with our supporters can be hard to do.
One of other biggest challenges, frankly, is that promoting equity in voter participation is often construed as a partisan activity, but we will not stop advocating for greater representation in the political process and in halls of power.
What motivates your team to continue working towards greater civic participation?
Kansans are hungry, sick, and housing insecure, and time and time again, the policies designed to uplift those most in need hit a brick wall in the state legislature. Historically, our nonprofit and advocacy communities respond reactively to crises, making it difficult to get ahead or make sustainable progress. The Voter Network is motivated to changing this paradigm by fostering an environment of experimentation and deep growth for the sake of equity in political participation and power. As we build our team and form new partnerships, we are looking for people who are also motivated by: tackling adaptive challenges, fostering creative collaboration, making political systems wildly intuitive and easy-to-use, and identifying and empowering new leaders.
How can skills-based volunteers help further your mission and goals during this year's election cycle?
Our most pressing needs are probably related to promoting our volunteer opportunities and online ballot guide. That would include program development, marketing and social media strategy, and graphic design/collateral development.
Share a success story where Catchafire volunteers made a significant impact on your civic engagement initiatives.
We worked with a volunteer accountant this spring who advised us on how to set up our Quickbooks chart of accounts, and I think every nonprofit professional here knows how exciting and impactful well-organized finance reports can be! We’re a small team and our plates are full with this upcoming presidential election, so being able to call on an expert that had been vetted by Catchafire was a huge relief and saved us real time and stress.
League of Women Voters of Metro St. Louis
Hear from Jean Dugan, Executive Director about the League of Women Voters of Metro St. Louis. Founded in 1919 on the heels of the suffrage movement, the League’s goal was to educate and empower voters. With budget as one of their biggest challenges, skills-based volunteers on Catchafire are helping the nonprofit engage more voters ahead of this year’s election.
Share your organization's mission and the specific civic engagement initiatives you focus on.
We envision a democracy where every person has the desire, the right, the knowledge and the confidence to participate.
What innovative approaches does your organization take to engage with the community to promote civic participation? What have been some of your most impactful initiatives to date?
We now have a GOTV toolkit for other organizations to promote voting.
What motivates your team to continue working towards greater civic participation?
Threats to democracy are increasing.
How can skills-based volunteers help further your mission and goals during this year's election cycle?
We are being asked to register voters at dozens of events each year.
Learn more about the League of Women Voters of Metro St. Louis.Get involved
Ready to make a difference? Visit our election hub to explore more ways you can get involved, access valuable voting resources, and take part in civic engagement activities that matter.
