Here's how you can start your own Youth04 Chapter

If you decide to start a Youth04 chapter on your campus, you will be taking advantage of a great opportunity to help young voters become more engaged in the upcoming elections.

As a Youth04 chapter leader, you will be joining other young people across the country in a growing, nationwide effort to establish a better relationship between politicians and youth voters. You will also play a vital role in bringing the opinions of young voters to the forefront and to energize your peers to become more politically active.

The position of chapter leader requires roughly 5-10 hours of work prior to the election (in September and October), although the actual amount may vary depending on whether or not the chapter has a Co-Chapter Leader. The chapter leader must also find the 3-5 volunteers that it requires to run a typical chapter.

These volunteers include the positions of:

• Viral volunteer
• Restaurant volunteer
• Community Technology Center (CTC) volunteer
• Posting volunteer

While these have specific tasks, a chapter leader's responsibility is to coordinate their activities and ensure that the chapter plays a constructive role in raising the level of political participation within a specific campus.

We are aware of the immense diversity of students throughout the country and as a result encourage each individual chapter to establish its own agenda. For example, some chapters may choose to focus more on local and state politics while others may choose to concentrate primarily on the presidential election.

Focusing on statewide races (whether it is for governor or U.S. Senate) as well as the presidential race will lead chapters to cooperate with other chapters in their own state. If, on the other hand, a chapter focuses on a congressional (or county executive) race, then this chapter will only coordinate with other chapters which are also affected by this race. Whatever their focus or methods, we believe that through the effort, energy and dedication of each chapter, we can get an increasing number of young voters involved in the political process.

In addition to using your own creativity and imagination, as a chapter leader you will be asked to implement some of our signature activities. One signature activity in particular involves the use of petitions to raise awareness on topics that are relevant to local/state/national politics. The topic could be about giving a certain policy issue a more prominent place in a campaign or it could be about some feature of the campaign itself, such as whether it is too focused on negative sound bite television ads.

Beyond the signature activities, as chapter leader, you can also choose to partake in voter registration activities, organizing debates and traditional activities of youth civic engagement organizations. However, remember that the distinctive quality of Youth04 is that it not only tries to get young people involved with politics, but also to get candidates involved with young people.

Through our website individual chapters can stay current on the petitions formulated by fellow chapters throughout the country. Through such collaboration and through the imaginative efforts of individual chapters, petitions can aggregate student sentiments in their districts or their state, and thereby provide a platform through which the concerns of young voters can be addressed.

Your goal is to motivate politicians to respond, whether through op-eds they write in your student newspapers, through posts on the Youth04 page for your state, through speeches, or through visits to your campus in which they address your concerns. Every state will be different. You are also encouraged to develop innovative strategies for creating a dialogue between candidates and young voters. Do whatever you feel is necessary! Our future is stake!

Viral Volunteers

The Viral Volunteer needs to concentrate his or her efforts on creating a message and moving it around campus.

Creating the Message:

• The message should be short (a petition can be one sentence).
• It should also be very clear on all levels. Explain exactly what is you want the reader to do, what you plan to do with the results and why Youth04 wants to compel politicians to respond to youth.

There are three primary levels of e-mails in which you should try to push the message.

1. Targeted e-mails to close friends which will serve as recruitment letters for more volunteers.
2. Targeted e-mails to key organizations on campus such as College Democrats or College Republicans.
3. General e-mails to be posted on as many university discussion boards as possible.

Restaurant Volunteers

The Restaurant Volunteer needs to focus on finding restaurants or cafés that will participate in Youth04 by offering incentives such as freebies or discounts to college aged people.

• You should contact local and small businesses rather than big chains.
• When you go in to make your pitch, take a packet in that has pertinent information about Youth04. Your pitch should be limited to about two minutes due to time constraints of business managers.
• Explain that the money lost due to discounts will be made up in increased business, but also try to appeal to their social conscience as well.

The Restaurant Volunteer needs to also explain the purpose of the discounts and why Youth04 is dedicated to attracting young people to the restaurant and cafés, the primary reason being that we want to get young people politically involved.

• We want to get young people to talk about political races that matter to them and meeting at the restaurant is a great way to get people talking about a race.
• We want to motivate small groups to show up, rather than have large meetings, because this is where actual discussions can be held.
• We want these discussions to lead to participation on a Youth04 state website.

Community Technology Center (CTC) Volunteers

The goal of the CTC Volunteer is to reach the more than half of all 18-25 year olds are not in or have never been to college.

• A good way to start is to see if your campus has an existing CTC outreach program. If so, it is possible that a Youth04 program could be incorporated with an existing one.
• Being a CTC Volunteer is as easy as simply walking to a CTC and striking up a conversation with an attendee. See if other Youth04 volunteers are interested in going with you.
• Try out various and new tactics to get people involved.

Posting Volunteers

Each chapter needs at least one person responsible for keeping the state page of the Youth04 website updated. As Posting Volunteer, it is advised that you upload links (send them to us and we will actually upload them on the Youth04 website) and material on races that affect 18-25 year olds in your area.

• Post news stories, announcements of events, anything that you see fit for the engagement of 18-25 year olds into the political process.
• Put up information relating to schools in your state that do not have a Youth04 chapter, this may very well inspire someone to start one.