by Riley Blankenship

On September 13, Elon University held its ninth annual North Carolina voter summit for college students who are civically or politically engaged on their campus.  notable colleges in North Carolina were in attendance: University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Appalachian State and University of North Carolina Charlotte just to name a few.  organizations across North Carolina and even out of state were in attendance and spoke during the summit regarding college student voter engagement and successes they personally have had working with different colleges Greensboro College was invited to attend the summit again for third time. This year Warche Downing, director of student success along with Greensboro Colleges own student body president sophomore CJ Watson as well as myself represented our college. The main objective of this non-partisan summit is to spread more information regarding campus engagement with elections.

This engagement summit started with four notable students from UNC Chapel Hill, NC A&T and Elon University speaking on how they have personally started engagement coalitions within their own campuses and also sharing insight on how other colleges could do similar.  Several other guest speakers spoke at the summit, one notable, the director of unstoppable voters Rachel Karp who spoke on “making every action count.” This went further into how to get more college students engaged with voting. The summit was not just all speeches; during the duration there were two breakouts where students could go to a handful of breakout sessions ranging from how to write better opinion articles regarding politics, how to be an active activist, as well as many others.

After the breakout sessions, students came back and were told to a proposal of how to be better civically engaged within their campuses. Very similar to the popular TV show “Shark Tank” summit leaders took a twist naming this Vote Tank where summit leaders would act as judges as students representing their campus proposed their ideas. For our campus, Watson and I chose #Breaktradition as our slogan pitching our idea to make Greensboro College more engaged with voting with a multitude of different activities, one notable a talent show to bring awareness to college voting. To promote this, Watson proposed that we set up a flyer prior to get word out using current social media trends such as Chappell Roan’s “Hot To Go” but instead put a twist using “It’s hot to vote”.  Another idea that was proposed in our pitch was a table set up during lunch hours to see if students are registered to vote. The best part of it all out of all the colleges that participated in our campus won first place with both Watson and I winning $25 gift cards.

This was a wonderful opportunity for Greensboro College as a whole as well as for myself, Watson and Warche Downing. This was the first ever political event I have attended. I was far from amazed to say the least. As a political science major, I feel I really got a feel for politics and to further my networking skills. If I took anything away from the summit, matter” is simply untrue because in actuality it matters a lot more than you may think.