With Election Day just around the corner, two Chapel Hill High School students are working to educate the community and encourage others to participate in the voting process – even when they are too young to vote themselves.
Kate Berreth is 17-years-old and a senior at Chapel Hill High School. She is also a Content Director for Foreign Policy Youth Collaborative – a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization that highlights youth perspectives on global and national issues.
“Often times I feel like foreign policy can seem hard to grasp for teenagers,” Berreth said. “It’s pretty difficult to even grasp domestic policy as you’re learning about it, but foreign policy is just another level of difficulty. So, I think we’ve really been trying to give teens a platform to speak and have discussions about foreign policy and foreign issues.”
Berreth said she was inspired to get involved with this nonprofit because she wanted to become more educated and empathetic towards other countries and governments. She said the Foreign Policy Youth Collaborative works to make news and policies more accessible to teens, especially during election seasons.
“On our social media we’ve really been trying to help educate and simplify what’s been happening, the presidential debates – all of that,” Berreth said. “We really try to reach out to other teens in a very understandable way so they can understand what’s going on.”
Even though she is too young to vote, Berreth said it’s important for today’s youth to be educated on local and international politics to make more informed decisions in the future.
“I think it’s really valuable having younger people understand how our government works and the value of a vote – one, because the voting numbers are so low for 18 to 24-year-olds,” Berreth said. “So, we hope to prepare our following to make educated decisions for when the time comes that they do vote but also being able to have educated conversations with their family members about specific politics. Whether you can vote or not, I think the election will impact you the same way and so I think you should be prepared to understand exactly what the impacts are of an election on you and on your family as well as other countries.”
While Berreth works with Foreign Policy Youth Collaborative to educate teens on relevant international issues, Amelia Solum, another senior at Chapel Hill High School, works to educate the community on U.S. candidates and their policies ahead of elections.
In March, when the entire country went into quarantine due to COVID-19, Solum signed up to volunteer with MyVote Project, a nonpartisan voter education website. She works as the national lead for the on-the-ground campaign and is also a candidate researcher for their website.
“We basically do research on the background of these candidates and then we write out their policy platforms – and this all comes straight from their websites because we really make an effort to be nonpartisan,” Solum said. “Then, what we really focus on is all of the local candidates because when I’ve been doing this research it’s so hard to find information on local candidates. Most of the time they don’t have campaign websites, they barely have a Facebook – so we have to reach out to them directly to get their policy platforms.”
Solum said the goal of MyVote Project is to establish a “one-stop-shop” to easily access the policy platforms of national and local candidates without having to spend hours researching – all this to further encourage people to vote.
“I think my biggest thing around politics and voting that I care about is just making sure that people vote,” Solum said. “It’s not necessarily trying to persuade them to vote for one party or the other, but I’m just shocked at how few people vote. I am unfortunately one year too young to vote so I cannot imagine why people waste this super important civil responsibility.”
While Berreth and Solum are not able to directly participate this election season, Solum said educating the next generation of voters on issues that will matter to them is the next best thing.
“These issues – they’re mainly being presented by a much, much older generation who doesn’t know what’s going to affect us in the future,” Solum said. “Climate change issues – that’s all going to affect us, it’s not going to affect them. So if we don’t do anything, if we don’t speak up for these issues that affect our generation and not theirs, there’s not really anyone else who’s going to.”
Check out more national election coverage and local stories here.
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