As Election Day looms closer, nonprofits are leveraging resources to galvanize nonpartisan, low-propensity voters in hard to reach communities across New York City.

The GoVoteNYC funder collaborative, hosted at The New York Community Trust, allocates grants to nearly a dozen foundations with strong roots in local communities in an effort to educate and empower low-propensity voters.

“The desire was to focus on neighborhoods where there are trusted community groups who could engage voters in increasing turnout, with a particular focus on low-propensity voters,  basically people who don't vote very often,” said Neill Coleman, director of GoVoteNYC.

Founded in 2021, GoVoteNYC funders have invested nearly $3.5 million in grants and more than $13 million in aligned funding to support nonpartisan voter engagement. In 2021 and 2022, grant organizations contacted nearly 2 million registered voters across five boroughs. These outreach efforts led to higher turnouts among BIPOC voters, of which 37% of those canvassed by GoVoteNYC partners voted, versus 20 percent of those unreached.

“One of the challenges with low-propensity voters, it’s a bit of a self-reinforcing cycle. Political candidates tend to focus on engaging high propensity voters – people they know are very likely to vote,” said Coleman.

The Role of Nonprofits in Engaging Low-Propensity Voters

From canvassing efforts, workshops and nonpartisan get-out-the-vote activities – GoVoteNYC deployed nonprofits as “trusted messengers” to educate constituents on elected officials and policies.

“Trusted messengers break through the noise of misinformation and scandal that we are all exposed to and restore people's belief that their vote matters,” said Eve Stotland, senior program officer at The New York Community Trust. “If people are just reading the paper, or listening to the news on Tiktok they're going to get a lot of information that's wrong and that confuses them.”

Through trusted community leaders, nonprofit organizations are able to reach a wider range of reluctant, low-propensity voters, educating them on the impact of policies that can intimately affect their lives.

“If the person who runs their children's after school program, or the person involved in their senior center, or a neighbor who they trust offers to speak to them about an upcoming election, it's going to break through all that noise,” said Stotland. “That’s why nonprofits are so important and do something that political parties often are uninterested or unable to do.”

Read the full article about engaging low-propensity voters by Phenix Kim at NYN Media.