School News: Lobbying Congress from Home

Winter 2021

The pandemic has tested our democracy. Anticipating the November 2020 presidential election, many people asked, “Will mail-in voting be accessible for all Americans? Are there enough poll workers?” Despite not being old enough to vote yet, Anoushka Chander, 17, a senior at Georgetown Day School (DC), had the same concerns. Chander, who attended the first annual Women’s March months after the 2016 election, is no stranger to activism. She’s lobbied on Capitol Hill before—for gun violence prevention legislation—and she recently expanded her focus to voting rights.
 
In July, she used Zoom to talk to several legislators about the Vote Safe Act and the Vote by Mail Act. She’s also advocated for Congress to include election-protection funding in the next COVID-19 relief package. When she expanded her focus to voting rights, she found volunteers at her school who wanted to get involved in making change on a federal level. Last summer she founded a group called the Student Action Committee, which combats voter suppression through the Voter Mobilization Initiative and recruits and registers young people through social media, emails, and word of mouth to become poll workers. The Student Action Committee has signed up at least 216 high school students and adults to work at polling places in DC, Maryland, and Virginia.
 
“I think it’s super important to vote because it’s the best way to have your voice heard in this country,” she told Vice news in September. “And unfortunately for so many communities, there has been historical suppression of the vote.”

She plans to continue her virtual activism as long as in-person meetings are restricted. “We’re able to have way more meetings than we probably would have had in regular time, because [legislators] are just super busy if you try to go meet with them on the Hill. But now, you’re meeting with staffers, who are also in their bedrooms on Zoom.”

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Anoushka Chander (top row, third from right) and GDS Policy and Advocacy Institute’s Life Resettled fellows at the Arab-American Family Support Center
 

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