Last week I visited the State Capitol in Harrisburg to participate in Capital Day 2015, a public advocacy event organized by the Penn State Grassroots Network. I was one of four student leaders chosen to speak on behalf of an entire system of Penn State students. The Penn State Grassroots Network and four other large Penn State organizations—The Council of Commonwealth Student Governments, the University Park Undergraduate Association (UPUA), the Graduate and Professional Student Association, and the Schreyer Honors College sent representatives to the Capitol. I represented the Schreyer Honors College, addressing a large crowd at the Rotunda on the importance of keeping a Penn State education affordable. You can read the entire transcript of my speech HERE, but the basic message I articulated was this: The state government should increase appropriations to Penn State to ensure that the school is not forced to raise tuition to make up for budget shortfalls, and students are therefore not forced to take out loans they cannot afford.

The event featured many chances for student advocacy which complemented the speeches delivered by student representatives. Each Capital Day attendee was given some literature that included tips on effective advocacy and key messages to emphasize when meeting with State legislators. These messages included: Penn State is making my life better, Penn State is making our district stronger, and healthy state support helps Penn State. Many of the students who attended were able to individually meet with representatives from their home districts. Capital Day is, at its core, civic discourse. The opportunity to meet individually with a state legislator and lend your voice to an important cause is rare. A good politician is accessible and responsive to constituents. Though it is unfeasible for an elected official to discuss issues facing his/her district with each constituent, it is possible to invite feedback from concerned citizens. I interned for a U.S. Congressman this past summer and was able to see firsthand the effort politicians and their staffs put into communicating with their constituents. Teams of people working under the Congressman in his district office regularly issued press releases, staged town hall meetings, made phone calls, and wrote emails to citizens throughout the district. It did not matter whether a constituent was a supporter of the Congressman or affiliated with the Congressman’s political party. All that mattered was whether that person lived within the boundaries of the district, and if that was the case, that person would be informed of the Congressman’s recent actions.

A responsibility I had during my internship was logging the legislative opinions of each citizen who called the office into a database. I was informed this database would be used by Congressional staff as a way to find consensus within the district on divisive issues. The Congressman would then take that consensus into consideration when he voted on upcoming legislation. There were hundreds of thousands of opinions entered into that database. I question how many of these opinions addressed to the Congressman were ever read by their intended recipient. We tend to place unrealistic expectations on our elected officials. A commonplace in civic discourse is to write your Congressman about an issue when you are passionate about it. However, the person we elect is in the end only one man or one woman. The levels of bureaucracy in government make it unlikely that the person we seek to reach ever hears us. Politics starts at the local level. The decisions made by local representatives affect lives in communities of all sizes on a daily basis. If we truly want to be more actively involved in the political process, we should allocate more attention to this area of government. The political focus is generally placed on high-ranking national positions with particular deference to the Presidency. When certain issues are reported, the implications to be had on the next Presidential race is spotlighted rather than the substance of those issues. Coinciding with this lack of attention at the local level is poor voter turnout rates during non-Presidential election years. Rather than focus solely on the decisions of one man, let’s turn some of our attention to county executives, township managers, school-board representatives and other small-scale leaders whose decisions tremendously impact our lives.