We need the energy and the passion of young voices now more than ever. Over the past year, our team continued to help college students nationwide rise to the occasion by educating and engaging their peers, becoming leaders on their campuses and in their communities, and honing and utilizing advocacy and organizing skills to make a difference on issues that matter. We are excited to share our latest annual report! Read on to download the report and preview some highlights.
Annual Report Highlights
Youth Driven
During the 2022-2023 academic year, more than 1,600 students got involved with our program on 213 campuses across the country. Students took more than 74,000 campaign actions to fight for a shared vision of a better future.
Civic Engagement
In the the fall of 2022, 800 student volunteers, interns, and fellows working on 150 campuses around the country made 200,000 get-out-the-vote contacts to turn out their peers to vote in the midterm elections and make their voices heard. And it worked! Midterm youth voter turnout reached historic levels and the students we helped register turned out at 18 percentage points higher than the national average for young people.
Building a Sustainable Future
This year, we made significant progress in the fight against climate change and for a sustainable future. We helped pass statewide legislation to reduce plastic pollution in Calfornia, Oregon, and Washington state. And at the city level, we won a ban on polystyrene foam in San Diego, three plastic pollution reduction ordinances in Los Angeles (including a polystyrene ban), and the “Better Berkeley Bag Ban” in Berkeley. We also made progress on state climate policy in Massachusetts and California, and pushed for a federal plastic pollution reduction bill at our federal lobby day in Washington DC.
Supporting Students’ Basic Needs
This year, we worked to address students’ basic needs by running campaigns to end hunger and homelessness on campus, and to reduce the cost of textbooks. We did over 1,000 hours of service to help those in need and pushed for hunger-free campus legislation in four states. We released our newest research report on textbook affordability, highlighting the success of grant programs that help professors switch to free open source textbooks and the challenges that these programs face. And we helped four states introduce legislation to tackle the high cost of textbooks.