Three college students spent their summers at home building a website, Impact Change USA, to educate younger citizens about upcoming elections, voting registration and politicians. GBH Radio’s Henry Santoro spoke with co-founder and Hamilton College sophomore Chris Harrison, of Lincoln, Mass., who says he realized his peers needed a quick and easy way to access political information. The transcript below has been edited for clarity.
Henry Santoro: So there you were, stuck at home all summer with Mom and Dad. Some kids would be creating a new playlist on Spotify. Some would be sliding down the TikTok rabbit hole, but not you. How did you come up with this idea for Impact Change USA?
Chris Harrison: Well, it's kind of funny, actually. I did spend a little while sliding down the TikTok rabbit hole and playing a lot of Xbox for the first couple of weeks of my summer. But then I saw a lot of energy and activism on Instagram, especially after the George Floyd stuff and all of that craziness. And I saw a lot of my friends really cared about the issues and wanted to get involved. And I was trying to make it easier for them to find new sources in a more relevant and still really simple and quick way.
Santoro: So tell us how the site works and what people find when they log in.
Harrison: So basically, you log in, you're going to go to a home page. You have a few options. You can either see the politicians in your area. Right now, we're crowdsourcing information. So a team of three, we're not able to cover every single politician in the United States right now, but we're trying to get volunteers and stuff to keep adding politicians to the website.
And then you're also going to be able to look at the upcoming elections. Right now, we have the upcoming presidential and congressional elections for every state, and we're trying to put bios in for every politician. So, again, we're hoping to lean on some help from anybody to get those bios filled out. We'll tell you every single congressional election.
And then you can also look at the definition of political terms. We link to Vote.org to help you get registered to vote and figure out how to vote. And that's most of the site.
Santoro: The presidential election is really incredibly close right now. I mean, it’s literally right around the corner. How are you guys handling that? What are you focusing on to get the information on the site for that?
Harrison: A lot of the information we got from the candidates’ pages and what they say about themselves and what their stated goals are. But based on those things, we kind of distilled a page and a half or like a couple of pages of information on each issue into a sentence or two. And we'll say, like, “Joe Biden is trying to do blank to address COVID.”
Santoro: So what you're doing is really you're taking all of their in-depth material and in-depth viewpoints on different platforms and you're simplifying it.
Harrison: Yeah, that's exactly the goal. And I think especially for people in my generation who are so used to quick things on Instagram and stuff — I'm the same way. Personally, I find it challenging if I'm just going to watch the news an hour straight. Like, I'll get distracted. I'll have other things on my mind and stuff, and I won't necessarily absorb all the information. Whereas if you can make it really — if it still captures the point, and you can make it like a lot quicker, I think people are going to be much more inclined to get politically involved if they really know what's going on more and can access that information.
GBH News intern Charles Xu assisted with production.
