So, what were you doing during history class? We’re here to teach you about redistricting, gerrymandering 101, and the power of your vote.

So how can you help? How can we ensure that the now-fair Pennsylvania maps stay fair? Easy: you #VoteThatJawn. Everything that has happened

YOU’RE NOT REGISTERED TO VOTE? — THAT’S NOT P. By Tiara Risby Voting is more than a wave in the same way Gunna says “Pushing P” is more than a phrase — it's a lifestyle. Philly Youth Vote started two years ago to convince the Philadelphia School Board to use school as the place to get every high school senior who is eligible in Philadelphia registered to vote. What have they done. . .? The real question is what HAVEN’T they done? They’ve convinced 24 people and counting to te

All I did was sign up for a course taught by someone whose play I loved. It was last winter, just before theaters shut down. What I...

2020 has been a year of firsts for me. My first (legal) drink, first pandemic, first apartment, first presidential election, first Zoom...

When I stepped out of my house on Beyer Avenue on November 3rd, I took small sips of my coffee, believing I would have time to finish...

Someone has slit in half the 30-foot-long Black Lives Matter banner outside our St. Luke and the Epiphany. For the second time.

Intergenerational stories of voter participation to inspire your vote Voice That Jawn is a six-part podcast miniseries by #VoteThatJawn summer intern Michaela Prell that shares intergenerational stories of voting. Listeners will be inspired to vote when they hear stories from their peers, elders, and voices in between on why voting matters and how each voter participates in history. Episode one features 99-year-old Ms. Rena Graves of Germantown, who tells the story of her fir

By Carson Eckhard This article originally appeared in Philly Metro. You can view the original post here. In my Tampa, Florida high school in 2016, I learned the hard way that voting wasn’t an excused absence. The line at the poll was long. When I arrived at school, I was sent to the school office where they put a new tardy mark on my record. Why, I wondered, couldn’t voting be an excused absence? Now that I go to university here, I see that it can be. Philadelphia’s public sc

In January, a handful of young organizers perched in my office in the English Department at the University of Penn planning the 2020...

VoteThatJawn and Fresh Artists tap an army of kiddos to turn out the parent vote.

What’s your jawn? For Monique*, it’s the underfunding of Philly schools. For Sofia*, it’s the loss of a friend to gun violence...

Philadelphia Youth Poets Laureate and Philadelphia Chamber Music Society respond to Walt Whitman's "Election Day: November 1884" On September 17, #VoteThatJawn held a reading conceived in partnership with the Kelly Writers House and the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society (PCMS), to explore civic engagement and the youth vote through poetic responses to Walt Whitman's poem, “Election Day: November 1884." The Kelly Writers House featured original poems by Philadelphia Youth Poe

This guide offers a lesson plan and resources for teaching Whitman's "Election Day: November, 1884."

Learn how to write a blog for VoteThatJawn.com on your voting "jawn" — that issue that ignites a fire in you drives you to the polls.

Monnette Sudler never skips a vote. Never will. But as a kid, Sudler says, she wasn’t into politics. For her, it was all music.

Think, for a moment, about the fanfare that comes with life’s milestones: marriage, birth, quinceañera, driving, graduation… and so on.

By Sophie Burkholder The way we vote is about to be turned upside down. Fears of the coronavirus pandemic have prompted fears of in-person voting, and demand for mail-in ballots has seen a dramatic increase. There’s little that will stand in the way of the determined youth vote, but recent changes to the polling system because of the pandemic might challenge it. Pennsylvania’s mail-in ballot applications require voters to enter their driver’s license numbers, preventing those

“Just Mercy” tells the story of Bryan Stevenson, a criminal justice lawyer who moves to Alabama to represent wrongly convicted...

By Lorene Cary Special thanks to the Escobar family: three talented young musicians who live with their parents in suburban Philadelphia. In this podcast, Nicholas, the composer, Alec, the singer-songwriter, and Gabriel, the musical theater singer, actor, and dancer, are joined by their mom, Louisa Shepard, News Officer in Penn's Office of University Communications. We learned so many ways that their music had shaped their lives—and their whole family's. What did we miss? Wel

By Lorene Cary I wanted to play trumpet. Blow blow hard! A kid who had asthma, whose breathing sometimes felt like sucking air through a cocktail straw—ghostly, small, gaspy. Trumpets seemed shiny and strong, loud and brass and hard. A wall of shiny sound. I wanted to make that. Mom said that I would not want a callus on my lip like Louis Armstrong. Actually I did. I liked his lips. I liked to look at the black and white photo of him on the record album in Nana’s cupboard. Ha

Today, instead of youth from across the city meeting on Penn’s campus to get youth vote trending, #VoteThatJawn officially begins—ta-dah!—the Pandemic Re-think Everything Campaign. Recalculating! So what’s next? Virtual Jawn! Student contributors begin work this week to stock the new website Jawn like a trout stream with great content. They will be writing stories and curating multi-media to release starting April. Wanna contribute? Email us: VoteThatJawn@gmail.com. Student w

Organize, Strategize, Socialize, Share and Compare! It’s time to Vote That Jawn: How to get YOU and your friends to the polls. It’s finally Friday, and Vote that Jawn is less than 24 hours away! The VTJ team wants to share some real life stories of teachers and youth who have made moves in their communities and mobilized others to vote. It’s possible, and you can do it too! Many of the ideas in this list come from you, like collaborating with local voting registration dynamo

“Control Congress and you control the country.” That’s a quote from Yara Shahidi. Yara Shahidi stars in the hit TV shows Black-ish and Grown-ish. But that’s not all she does. Shahidi is also a model, political activist, and—most importantly — an 18-year-old. Why does it matter that she’s 18? Millions of us are 18. You may be 18, your siblings may be 18, your friends, cousins, maybe even your aunts or uncles. But what makes Yara Shahidi so special for being 18? She can VOTE! W