Vote That Jawn amplifies Philadelphia youth voices to help get their peers to the polls

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Vismita Holavanahalli first heard about Vote That Jawn when she was a senior at Central High School. Her teacher encouraged the class to get involved in civic engagement outside school.

“I applied with artworks I’ve done and gave a little summary of why civics is important to me and that’s how I got my start in the organization,” Holavanahalli said.

Vote That Jawn aims to get all young Philadelphians to the polls and to actively participate in politics by amplifying youth voices and giving them a platform to get excited about voting.

An organization led by youth voices

On Vote That Jawn’s website, Lorene Cary is listed as the founder of the organization. However, when asked, she gave more credit to the kids.

“I didn’t really found it,” Cary said. “I was an instrument of students who, after the Parkland shooting, were writing articles about young people.”

In her writing class at the University of Pennsylvania, Cary’s students started a blog, “Safe Kids Stories,” in the spring of 2018. The idea was to fill the site with stories that students could bring with them on the bus to the March for Our Lives.

“Read these, this is to keep you company and encourage you,” Cary said.

The students’ experience with the blog and March for Our Lives was “extraordinary,” she said, so much so that afterwards, they petitioned Cary to tailor the class to focus more on the youth vote. Later that summer, she worked with David Brown, a professor in Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University.

Together, along with almost a dozen college and high school students, they created Vote That Jawn and officially launched the organization in the fall of 2018.

Getting young people excited about voting

Carson Eckhard is the youth director at Vote That Jawn. Like Vismita, she also discovered the group while in school. In 2019, Eckhard was at Penn when she found out about the group. After joining as a contributor to the blog, she ended up working as a youth leader in the summer of 2020.

Now, while at Stanford University, she works with the high school and college team to coordinate youth voices in the blog and organize. Eckhard spoke to the importance of getting young people energized about civic participation.

“I think we saw firsthand in 2020 on a national scale what a big role Philadelphia played in a national election,” Eckhard said. “Our goal is to kind of have that moment every local election, where young people are seeing the real impact that getting to the polls have.”

Eckhard said the goal of Vote That Jawn is to amplify and create a community of youth voices that are speaking about the issues that are important to them in Philadelphia.

She described the desired goal of the organization as a “ripple effect.”

“You have young people creating poetry and art and videos, sharing what’s important to them,” Eckhard said. “That hopefully gets more people on board to be like, ‘Oh yeah I care about that too and I want to vote for insert issue.’”

Cary said that the “fairy dust” of the organization, what makes it tick, is harnessing young voices, aesthetics and issues. Everything can be brought to a vote, according to Cary. She wants to make that connection between an issue and what young people care about.

This spring semester, Holavanahalli is working to create content and other forms of social media to connect with a younger audience. The goal of the project is to create a base of civic knowledge for young Philadelphians.

“Making content in a way that younger audiences would enjoy and pay attention to is a good kickstart for them to recognize why it’s so important to show up for their communities,” Holavanahalli said.

Connecting through the arts

Rashawn Dorsey was a part of Summer Jawn 2025, a program where college and high school students are invited to create content that encourages other young people to vote.

“I went and shared one of my poems,” Dorsey said. “It was a good time.”

The 19-year-old said everyone came to share a common sentiment about civic engagement.

“We should all vote, it’s not stressful or hard,” Dorsey said. “It’s a thing we should do, and it’s easy.”

Last September, Dorsey became the 2025-26 Philadelphia Youth Poet Laureate. He held his first public performance at a Vote That Jawn event a month later in October at the Free Public Library.

Connecting through writing, poetry and art is one of the key pillars of Vote That Jawn.

The organization awarded its inaugural Erinda Shendo Memorial Prizes in 2025 to celebrate high school and college writers across the city who are speaking up about issues important to them.

This year’s awards will be held at the Kelly Writers House at Penn on March 24. The team will also be collaborating with ArtPhilly on June 3, as a part of the organization’s five-week arts and culture festival.

Over the past summer, Vote That Jawn employed its first visual artists to create paintings and collages, to then post on social media and the website.

“Having these in-person moments where everybody is together and exchanging their ideas and thoughts and sharing their art,” Ekhard said. “I think it’s another kind of core part of what the jawn is trying to do.”

The importance of youth voting programs

Holavanahalli said she’s seen many people her age talk about how they have lost hope in the past few months, how the weight of everything going on is affecting their mental and physical health.

The Temple University student said, in times such as these, youth civic engagement programs like Vote That Jawn are necessary. It’s important to understand that the youth can make the change everyone wants to see, according to Holavanahalli.

“If we don’t use our voices now, it will just feel like the hurt and frustration is continuously building up,” Holavanahalli said. “It’s better to have spaces where you can have an opportunity to do something and have your voice heard and your ideas put out so you can start to contribute to that change, whether it’s on a smaller scale or a large one.”

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Editor’s Note: This story is part of a series on Youth Civic Engagement funded by the William Penn Foundation. WHYY News produces independent, fact-based news content for audiences in Greater Philadelphia, Delaware and South Jersey.