Volunteers are a valuable addition to any political campaign. But many parents and kids have a confusion: Can minors volunteer for political campaigns?
Yes, minors can volunteer in political campaigns without any legal trouble. Even though they cannot vote, minor volunteers can still convince their friends and family to vote, raise up a specific issue in their community, shout out for their favorite candidate, and help political campaigns in their logistics.
Even though minors cannot vote directly in elections, they can easily volunteer in campaigns to help their favorite candidate win elections.
There are numerous benefits of volunteering for political campaigns, which means that your minor child can get miles ahead of their agemates if they take part in campaign volunteering.
What Can Minor Volunteers Do in a Political Campaign?
Minor volunteers can help the political campaign in the following forms:
Convincing Family and Friends to Vote for their Favorite Candidate
Minor volunteers can convince their parents and friends to change their political inclination. Many campaigns engage minor volunteers for the very reason that kids are efficient in persuading their family members to change their voting preferences
Increasing Messaging Outreach for Their Favorite Candidate
The Internet is revolutionizing political campaigns, and minors are extremely efficient at using technology these days.
So, your minor child can leverage the power of the Internet to volunteer for political campaigns.
Some of the feasible options for political volunteering for your minor child include:
If your child is a good writer, they can start a political blog. If they have good camera skills, creating a YouTube channel for political advocacy is an equally good option.
Using Social Media to Help Candidate
Minors who have a tendency to get vocal about the injustice around them can easily make their voice heard in this era of technology. All you need to do is to sign up for social media platforms and post your political campaigning efforts out there. Minors can also post their volunteering activities on social media platforms to have a bigger impact.
Helping Voter Registration Drives
Let’s say you are a minor but you know people who are capable of voting. You can easily check if they have registered to vote or not. If you know people who have not registered to vote despite reaching adulthood, then you can also convince them to register. If you want to do social activism as a minor, one of the ways is to set up a voter registration camp in your school or locality to help people register to vote.
While it might seem strange, there are enough minors who are leading the voter registration drives in their areas.
Consider this case study of a Youth activism boot camp, YEA Camp. They train children aged 12-17 for social activism and advocacy causes. One of their former students, Ana Little-Sana, led a voter registration drive in her school in San Diego and managed to register 10% of school students for voting.
As you do this, you will surely attract people who also wanted to launch voter registration drives but were reluctant to do it.
Leveraging Yard Signs to Impress Voters
You can install a photo booth outside your place with different political signs. This way, people of likewise political thought will take photos outside your place and upload those photos on their social media profiles.
Minor volunteers can put the t-shirts of their favorite candidates and put their stickers outside their houses or on their cars. This motivates other people to take part in the political process.
Helping Campaigns in Rally Logistics
Political campaigns always need helping hands to make logistics in their rallies. And minors can also help them in arranging these rallies in the best possible way. But you need to be aware that you must not over-promise with any campaign, as it can have a negative impact on your social reputation.
Helping Adult Volunteers
More often than not, you will see minor campaign volunteers doing not-so-labor-intensive tasks. They will end up arranging seats in rallies, putting up campaign signs, pasting stickers and banners, and accompanying adult volunteers in the door-to-door canvassing. However, you will rarely see a 12-year-old minor doing phone banking in political campaigns. There are two reasons for that:
- Political campaigns may not assign very important tasks to minor volunteers.
- Child labor laws may come into play if campaigns put minor volunteers on too much labor-intensive work.
But what should minors do when they want to learn the political campaign process in detail? In such a case, if you know an elderly person who is also volunteering for the same campaign, you can also help them in their campaign work.
Minor Doing Political Volunteering: A Case Study From Canada
And minor political volunteering is something that is observed all across the globe. For example, kids in Canada gathered at their nearest campaign office to participate in campaign activities for their favorite candidates. Those kids had only one passion: to make their favorite candidates select for public offices so they could craft favorable policies for their future. Here is a story of 6 kids volunteers in the presidential election of Canada.
Why is Political Volunteering Important for Minors?
As a matter of fact, minors have a great inclination toward the political process. But when they see that they cannot vote, most of them end up silently observing the whole election process. This means that they are wasting their energy which they could use to bring positive change in the election cycle.
If you are a parent who wants their minor children to take part in a political process, you should look for volunteering opportunities for them.
Final Thoughts
Political volunteering at an early age also opens the doors to endless possibilities. Before reaching adulthood, minor political volunteers have enough social connections and communication skills that can help them go far in their lives. Later on in their lives, minor volunteers can drive the whole campaigns just like adult volunteers who make a big difference in any political campaign.
So if you are a minor looking to volunteer in a political campaign or a parent who wants their children to make progress in social activism, political volunteering can be a highly rewarding field.
One of the easiest ways to start out with minor political campaign volunteering is to team up with other minor volunteers who are ready to engage in political activities. This way, minors can discover new ways of social activism.
