With over 1.7 million members, Color Of Change is the nation’s largest online racial justice organization. We design strategies and campaigns that help change the written and unwritten rules that affect Black people’s lives and have the greatest potential to advance racial justice.
2020 is a pivotal election year, and it’s also the 150th anniversary of the 15th Amendment, which recognized Black men’s right to vote in all states. To mark the occasion, we are offering this toolkit to raise awareness of the current state of voting rights. You can use these tools and resources to learn more and most importantly, to take action. Like our partners at Zinn Education Project, we know that history is made by everyday people working together to make positive change. We invite you to step into this history and do your part to ensure that all kinds of people are fully and fairly represented in this country.
While this toolkit is designed with youth and students in mind, we hope that anyone who cares about protecting and expanding voting rights in the United States will find it helpful to their activism. This country belongs to all of us, and we all have a role to play in making it a safe and just place for us all to live.
Voting is the basis of our representative democracy, yet voting isn’t universally accessible to all eligible voters. In some communities, voting is a relatively quick and simple task, while in others, it can be an hours-long process — if you can vote at all. What is the state of voting rights in your community and state? And what ideas do you have to make it better?
Humor is a great way to raise awareness of important issues like voting rights! How can you use your creativity to spread the word about voting rights? You can use this meme generator or photos of your own to make a meme, and tag your posts with the hashtags #TeachVotingRights, #LearnVotingRights, and #BlackLivesMatterAtSchool to connect with other folks who are learning about, teaching about, and organizing for voting rights.
When you go online to learn and share about voting rights (or anything else), you may encounter trolls and bots that try to confuse, bully, and otherwise discourage people from participating in democratic processes like voting. Report, mute and/or block them & move on — don’t respond! Interacting with them wastes your time and energy while strengthening their influence. Use that energy to learn and take action instead.