The IU Student Association began developing plans over the summer to encourage student civic engagement through awareness campaigns and voter registration drives.
At the Association of Big Ten Students meeting in July, IUSA President Sara Zaheer worked with student body presidents of other universities to set voter registrations goals.
IU sponsored a bill making civic engagement a priority, and ABTS collectively set a goal to register 30,000 students to vote across the 14 conference schools before November elections.
“It only happens every four years,” Zaheer said. “We might as well make it a part IUSA’s fall goals.”
When IUSA knows how many students on campus are registered to vote, Zaheer said, it can help their organization lobby for students at the state level. It shows legislators that students are engaged with politics and should be considered an active demographic.
IUSA has also contacted the Political and Civic Engagement program to learn about what they’re doing for voter registration efforts, including their involvement with the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, which recognizes campuses active in politics.
“We’re just going to figure out where we fit with all these moving parts and be a resource for students, because civic engagement is important,” Zaheer said.
IUSA is still developing other goals for the year. Some issues from their spring campaign — such as adequate campus lighting — are already being addressed by administration, Zaheer said, so IUSA executives are trying to find where to turn their attention next.
“We’ve given them a lot of freedom for what they want to focus on,” Zaheer said. “We’re in the process of learning where we can be useful.”
A long term goal for IUSA is to create a new Vision of the Ideal College Environment report. VOICE reports have been done in the past, most recently in 2013, and they surveyed students on a variety of issues from the quality of academic advising to the strength of campus wifi.
Initial work on the report may start this semester, but it would not be finished and publicized until the spring.
“I think we’re going to do a VOICE report to say, ‘It’s 2016, and this is what students want,” Zaheer said.
