Barnum Hall outside of the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life. The private research institution, Tufts University, is looking for proposals on an upcoming conference for July.
Usually, I would post a monthly blog feature that is somehow connected with lowering the voting age. However, given that it is the annual no taxation without representation edition of the blog, Tax Day & an open possibility to collaborate with members of various networks supporting lowering the voting age, I’m going to make an exception this time.
So there’s an open call for presenters this summer for an event in Boston where those with new ideas can present and where I will be traveling to this summer as part of my travel tour of the U.S. to promote House Joint Resolution 23. The Frontiers of Democracy Conference will take place in July, however ideas are being accepted to provide a presentation during the conference. I am interested in forming a discussion panel with members of the Colloquium, but also allies of the Colloquium like youth organizations, climate activists and other youth suffragists, many of whom I already am in contact with. The deadline to submit an idea is on May 1st.
The conference would be one of many important events I will be going to during the course of the summer, but possibly, one of the most important in terms of being able to collaborate on a joint effort with members of the Colloquium and other youth rights supporters.
Because of this, I would like to make an open call to members of the Colloquium who would like to participate on a panel to talk about House Joint Resolution 23. Unlike most events I will be involved in this summer, the advantage of this option is that even international members of the Colloquium can participate, as not all panelists need to be present- there is an option for co-panelists to present remotely. As long as one main organizer is present, all other panelists can participate no matter where in the world they are located, much like we already do t our regular Colloquium webinars. The panel can go up tp 90 minutes, so there is ample time for numerous organizations who support some form of expanding enfranchisement to provide information on their personal work, regardless where you’re located in the world. Rather than discussing the various degrees of enfranchisement amongst ourselves, we have an opportunity to all participate, though I would be willing to be one or more of the representatives to physically go there to present if our proposal idea is selected.
There are some limits & rules to submitting entries, however. I spoke with organizers of the event this past week, and they clarified that while a person can submit multiple entries if each entry is different from each other, i.e. I will talk about lowering the voting age to 16 in one entry, another entry will discuss climate change, and another entry will talk about the efforts of fellow Colloquium members to expand voting rights, I cannot submit an entry to form a Colloquium panel, then have several of us do the same thing to increase the chances of being picked. We can all submit ideas, but they have to be unique and original.
You can submit an entry where, as an example, a Colloquium member might want to form a panel and ask me to talk about my contributions towards youth suffrage. I could be a contributor to a climate panel, a civic panel, a proxy voting panel, etc., but each submission has to be unique, not copies of the same proposal with different people submitting the same idea, so if you’re versatile and can talk about many issues, you can contribute to any kind of panel, but you’ll likely only contribute to one panel on that day if one of our ideas is chosen. Although the panel would be suffrage in general, I could still contribute to other panels because lowering the voting age counts as expanding suffrage. Whether your idea is chosen or mine, the main theme of the conference is democracy, so if a panel is convened, it has align with that theme.
I think that if there is an idea among members of the Colloquium to do a Colloquium-focused event, I would be willing to be a panelist for that idea, but I think that someone else should form a separate entry for it because they would have the most experience for it. Because of my focus on my awareness efforts this summer, I would like to form a panel that looks at lowering the voting age to 16, particularly where House Joint Resolution 23 is concerned. I believe such a panel could benefit from us in a similar way that Next Up in Oregon did that incorporated a national panel of contributors two years ago today. However, the only difference this time is that the panel would be focused on the House Joint Resolution 23 bill and internationally, rather than nationally like the panel video shown above.
I would like to form a panel as diverse as possible, incorporating as many diverse organizations as possible that have been focused on lowering the voting age, and would be interested in working with around half a dozen individuals who would like to form a panel behind the idea of lowering the voting age and discussing the merits of it.
If you would like to get in touch with me to collaborate on the conference panel, please get in touch with me as soon as possible.
Jester
#16ToVoteAdvocacyProject 