Civic Participation

In order to shape the policies that affect their lives, immigrants must build political strength beyond election day. The NYIC promotes the full civic participation of immigrants through a comprehensive Civic Engagement program by educating and mobilizing voters, registering new citizens to vote, ensuring that candidates and officials address immigrant issues, and developing community leaders. In order to facilitate the civic engagement of immigrants, the NYIC:

• Organizes City and State Advocacy Days to promote the Coalition's budget and legislative agendas.
• Cultivate a diverse corps of leaders and members through leadership development trainings and our REMAP, where members come together to demand accountability from government and educate the rest of their community about civic participation. The collaborative conducts voter education and get-out-the-vote activities, which play a critical role in ensuring that voters understand their rights inside and outside the voting booth and are informed about where candidates stand on issues of importance to New York's immigrant communities.
• Builds immigrant voting power through our nationally recognized New Citizen Voter Registration Project, the largest voter registration project in New York State.

Voter registration;

• Civic participation issues;
• Advocacy;
• Outreach;
• Events; and
• Trainings

Some of the issues the Collaborative works on include language access, participatory budgeting, resident equity voting rights and access, immigrant representation, campaign finance reform, Board of Elections reform, and justice for immigrant job-seekers. For information about Our City, Our Vote, our campaign to expand municipal voting rights for immigrants living in New York City, please visit our campaign page.