Heartland Community College Civic Engagement Representative explains how they raise student involvement during election season

NORMAL, Ill. – After Heartland Community College was named the top Illinois community college for student voting and registration in 2022, they’ve strived to continue their high civic engagement streak. HCC’s Service-Learning & Civic Engagement Faculty Coordinator Karla Huffman is highly involved in the effort to connect students to civic engagement.

“So this is in addition to my role as communication professor, but my main goal is to kind of be the go-between between students and faculty about any initiatives concerning service learning, which is basically when students can apply what they’re learning in the classroom to any sort of involvement out in the real world,” Huffman said. 

There are a few different ways in which Huffman and HCC connect students, with one of the biggest being through classwork.

“I’ve done my speech classes where students have had to give group presentations on everything around voting- meaning reasons why people vote or why they don’t vote, teaching about the electoral college and then talking about in a persuasive way,” Huffman said.

Students then use their persuasive speeches to interact with each other on campus, resulting in some students registering and others still choosing to abstain. Heartland also works closely with nationwide initiatives, one of which being the All In Challenge.

“It’s basically a drive-thru tabling, talking to classes and getting students to commit to being ‘all in’, which means ‘I’m going to be all in, I’m going to register to vote and then actually vote,'” Huffman said.  “So they make a commitment by going online and saying I’m all in this year.”

When techniques don’t work for Heartland, they change up their strategies and try to stick to the basics like informing students and showing them how to register and become informed on who they may want to vote for.

“I think what we’ve learned though is when we try to plan events around voter registration, sometimes it’s successful and sometimes it’s not, but rather small tabling events around the semester seems to work best for us,” Huffman said.

Students can access the commitment statement and more information at allintovote.org.