MyVote Project - Incite at Columbia University

Local politics affect many aspects of everyday life, including education, transportation, and public safety. However, participation in local politics is often low.

Through our partnership with MyVote Project, we worked to reimagine what local voter engagement could look like, taking cues from young New Yorkers.

“We want to help communicate to candidates what their constituents care about and we want voters to know who they’re electing and why.”

MyVote Project was founded in 2018 by Sari Kaufman, a survivor of the Parkland, FL school shooting and now a student at Yale, David McAdams, a professor at Duke University and Gita Stulberg, a native New Yorker and experienced community organizer.

It began as a grassroots movement linked to escalating gun violence in America, and evolved into a robust, nationwide movement. When Covid-19 hit, a flood of young volunteers discovered MyVote Project and the organization set out to develop new ways of engaging and empowering them.

MyVote Project chose New York City, as the most diverse and multicultural city in the country, as a testing ground for developing this new engagement model. Incite provided intellectual and administrative support, as well as access to spaces around the city.

Between 2022 and 2023, MyVote Project and Incite partnered to engage young volunteers in leading nonpartisan community conversations about local issues. This new model of voter education built upon MyVote Project's mission of creating voters who are more informed and engaged at the local level. Outputs from the conversations were used to develop the organization's digital voter information database.

Gita Stulberg, Executive Director of MVP, said of the partnership, "It is our hope to replicate this model across the country and have it eventually serve as a vehicle for informing local political platforms on the issues and/or policies that captivate voters and bring them to the polls.”