Why It Matters: Civic and Electoral Participation

At a time when questions, concerns, and misinformation swirled across our country about the value, understanding, and need for civics, particularly the United States’ electoral college and the definition of civic participation, we launched “Why It Matters: Civic and Electoral Participation” to explore those questions with our communities. This initiative ran from October 2020 through spring 2021 and explored the history, importance and impact of the American electoral process. Through hundreds of free humanities programs, councils engaged the public in collaborative, accessible, and thought-provoking dialogues about the history of civic and electoral engagement. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the majority of these events were held virtually. Through the initiative, the Federation archived more than 250 of these programs into an online, filterable website repository and launched a social media campaign #WhyCivicsMatters to highlight the connections between the humanities and civic engagement.