Summer Archives

Sophie Goddyn Nashville, TN - League of Women Voters of Nashville

Community for a Common Cause

My summer project with the League of Women Voters of Nashville was a great lesson in the overwhelming system of support in both the Nashville and Tennessee communities. I think that I came into our project with the pessimistic assumption that any individuals or organizations from whom we might ask assistance would not be particularly interested in aiding us. We experienced the exact opposite. We found an absolute wealth of resources and support in our community partners beyond the LWVN.

A major component of our project involved virtual focus groups in the form of online surveys. We aimed to compile information regarding the civic literacy of Tennessee youth by having a range of young people across the state describe their knowledge of the voting process and government. We aggressively bugged our peers on social media and received a sizable number of responses accordingly, but the major challenge was finding more Tennessee-native youth. To do so, we contacted professors at colleges across the state, and heads of youth-focused organizations and requested that they share our survey with their students. To be perfectly honest, if I were one of these professors or community leaders I probably would have ignored our email or dismissed it as spam. Yet, these individuals not only passed along our request, but expressed such overwhelming excitement and support for our mission. Many offered to give us further assistance, shared related articles, and insisted that we contact them if we needed more help. Some of my favorite responses included a community leader sharing it on all of her social media, and a professor devoting an entire class period to watching and evaluating our videos!

Outside of organizing the focus groups, we interacted with the Nashville community through a series of events. We went to the LWVN annual full-membership meeting and got to meet the diverse group of individuals involved in the organization. They were all so willing to give us advice and make themselves available as a resource. We had a series of meetings with members of the Davidson County Election commission, and not only did they review all of our videos and take time out of their days to meet with us, but they let us borrow an actual voting machine for a whole month! We got to film people using the voting machine for our videos, and whenever we had guests over at our apartment we got to let them try voting on the machine! One of my favorite experiences was doing voter registration at the International Refugee Celebration. We became friends with members of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, and they invited us to an Islam 101 seminar and dinner, where we got to meet a number of community members.

One of the most special parts of doing this project for me was getting to interact with so many members of the Tennessee community outside of just the League. We learned that Tennessee is home to a diverse population that embraces intersectionality and works together to pursue justice.

For more, please visit League of Women Voters of Nashville and MyFirstVoteTN.org