Penn Nursing recently launched an initiative to increase voter registration and civic engagement among students and the community.
Credit: Jean ParkPenn Nursing launched a nonpartisan initiative called ‘Nurses for the Vote, Chart the Future,' targeted towards increasing voter registration and civic engagement across campus.
The initiative was created in collaboration with the Office of Government and Community Affairs, marking the first time that the OGCA and a Penn school have developed a voter registration project of this scale. The program will be open to Penn Nursing students who are committed to bolstering voter participation throughout their community.
Student leaders of the initiative will host voter registration drives and work closely with local organizations to facilitate greater access to voting and civic engagement education.
Penn Nursing’s Senior Director of Community Engagement Monique Howard said that the program will help bridge the gap between voting and public health by placing an emphasis on the critical overlap that exists between the two domains.
“Healthcare and politics are married, and I think that when we try to separate them, we do a disservice to both,” Howard said. “But it is important that nurses and other healthcare practitioners have some level of civic engagement because the decisions that are made [will] impact how they serve [and] who they serve.”
Penn Nursing partnered with Vot-ER, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to bridging the gap between civic engagement and healthcare through nationwide voter registration platforms. Similar to Nurses for the Vote, Chart the Future, the organization is led by a community of healthcare professionals including clinical students, physicians, and technologists.
In advance of the 2024 presidential election, Vot-ER has partnered with over 500 hospitals and clinics across the country to help student leaders work to heighten civic participation on a local level.
“We help with the tools and the training,” Vot-ER Organizing Manager Brett Scruton said. “But when there’s an initiative there, when there’s a desire and an infrastructure built around people, it’s easy for us to support that, so we were really excited to team up with Penn Nursing for this.”
As part of the initiative, students will be given access to QR codes supplied by Vot-ER. Once a student scans the code, they will be redirected to the organization’s nonpartisan voter registration platform Turbovote, which will verify their eligibility. Once vetted, students will be prompted to either update their voter registration status, request a mail-in ballot, or learn more information about upcoming elections.
The initiative will also operate under Vot-ER’s broader Healthy Democracy Campaign, which uses competition to encourage nonpartisan civic engagement. Running from Sept. 3 to Nov. 5, schools that have partnered with Vot-ER can compete amongst one another and earn points by empowering community members to vote.
At the formal launch event for the initiative on Sept. 18, students will begin their training on how to operate the Vot-ER platform as well as how to leverage other digital tools to help boost student engagement in voting. The initiative’s partnership with Vot-ER further aims to equip nursing students with the skills necessary to emerge as civic leaders not only in healthcare but also within their own communities.
“Our organization’s mission is to integrate civic engagement into healthcare,” Scruton said. “For students learning this now and doing this work — whether it’s for the Healthy Democracy Campaign at any school or whether it’s specifically at Penn Nursing — I think that it’s going to make a big difference in the future, and we hope to see an age where this is just commonplace, where people aren’t going to blink twice about ‘are you registered to vote’ as a healthcare question.”
To garner student interest in the initiative ahead of its official launch, leaders of the program hosted a joint event with OGCA earlier this month and continued recruitment efforts at Penn Nursing’s Back to School Welcome event. Additionally, directors of the initiative sent out a Listserv email to nursing students last Friday to offer more information about the program’s specific operations and objectives.
Following the election’s conclusion, Penn Nursing and its partner organizations plan to sustain their commitment to fostering a strong culture of civic engagement on campus through student involvement.
“[In the future], I hope to train up the next cohort of civically minded healthcare professionals so that they can continue to do the work,” Howard said.
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