LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK

Membership and Volunteer ManagementAs a membership organization led and run by volunteers with minimal paid staff, recruiting, activating, and engaging with our volunteers and community partners is a vital and ongoing component of our work. Our voter outreach and civic engagement activities are all volunteer run, and we field requests for voter registration events, training, and speakers through our website throughout the year, not just during election season. This fiscal year those events reached over 10,000 New Yorkers. Our student internship program has enabled us to train volunteers and activate on local college campuses during the academic year and offer research opportunities over vacation breaks.

Civic EngagementCritical aspects of the League of Women Voters of NYC outreach are the speaker events developed through its Speakers Bureau and Program Committee. In FY 2025, the Speakers Bureau held dozens of civic engagement workshops with community-based organizations throughout NYC both in person and virtually. These presentations seek to help participants create their own voting action plans: from registration to accessing the polls, developing strategies to influence elected officials through lobbying and advocacy; and share ideas with participants for becoming active in their home communities. The Speakers Bureau also collaborates with the Leagues Committee for Criminal Justice Reform to develop the Returning Citizens Project, incorporating information from our Civics 101 presentation, as well as information about the origins of the voting rights movement. The Program Committee organizes a monthly Lunch with the League speaker series, open to the public. Invited guest speakers included elected and appointed officials and experts on topics of interest including Congestion Pricing, NYCs finances, The Evolving Role of Women in Politics, Whats on the Ballot, and the Citys housing crisis.In addition, the League continued to expand civic engagement outreach through its partnership with the NYC Civic Engagement Commissions Citywide Participatory Budgeting (PB) initiative. Participatory Budgeting gives community members, as young as 11, across NYC the power and voice to propose ideas, and vote on how to spend a designated part of the city budget. In FY25 the League served as a Citywide Partner, conducting in-person Idea Generation Workshops in three boroughs, and balloting across the city connecting with more than 2000 residents. Much of the Leagues work also involves providing ways for members, and the community at large, to learn more about how local government works, become more engaged, and advocate for issues. First published in 1979, What Makes New York City Run is a primer on how NYC government is organized, and in FY25 we revised and updated this seminal publication. Furthering efforts to keep New Yorkers informed, as part of its partnership with the CUNY Graduate Research Center, the League was engaged to update and revamp Who Represents Me? (mygovnyc.org), a website that provides up-to-date contact information for elected officials at all levels of government for every address in New York City. In addition to regularly updating the information following each election, the League has conducted extensive outreach programs to promote awareness of, and usage of the site throughout the election season. As a nonpartisan organization, the League does not support any political party or candidate. However, it does advocate on behalf of issues that align with its core mission. Among these are the Equal Rights Amendment, voting reforms to expand voting access and civic education, and issues of social justice impacting New Yorkers.