Engaging and Mobilizing an Online Community:Reflections on the Hostos Debate Watch Parties
Helen Chang, Sarah Hoiland, and Rocio Rayo
Before the pandemic, our campus would have been teeming with activity and events on the Bridge and in student club offices, especially during a Census and an election year. During the remote environment that categorized most of 2020, the Service Learning and Civic Engagement Committee discussed activities and events, Library faculty developed online resources, and Hostos Student Government Association planned virtual voter registration drives. The tumult surrounding the 2020 Census, with an ever-changing stop date, added to the urgency as the Bronx was underreporting in early and mid-September. Among resources distributed by the Faculty Network for Student Voting Rights, Professor Hoiland, a sociologist and chair of the Service Learning and Civic Engagement Committee saw one idea that piqued her interest: Debate Watch Parties. The University of San Francisco was one of the only campuses that was promoting this type of event in September 2020, but their online assets provided a starting point. Professor Hoiland shared
the idea with several Hostos entities including the Service Learning and Civic Engagement Committee, Office of Communications, Student Activities, and Student Development Enrollment and Management (SDEM) and the first Debate Watch Party took place on September 29th, 2020. Rocio Rayo, a panelist in the first Debate Watch Party, stepped up as a co-organizer. Professor Chang, a political scientist new to Hostos in 2020, attended and invited her class and by the second Debate Watch Party on October 7th, 2020, was a co-organizer and a panelist.
Although each of the three Watch Parties was slightly different, they all followed the same basic format. The Zoom webinars started at 8:00 p.m. Rocio Rayo curated pre-debate video slideshows that included music, census and voting information, and graphic assets for other campus events. Our start time encouraged people to arrive early and for each of the events, a few dozen people joined the webinars before the pre-debate panels began at 8:30 p.m. The panels, led by students and Hostos alumni, centered around questions co-created by organizers and panelists before the events. At 9:00 p.m., we live-streamed the 90-minute debate and utilized Zoom Chat throughout to encourage attendee participation. At 10:30 p.m., we concluded with brief post-debate panels.
A post-event survey sent to 193 attendees yielded 51 respondents (26% response rate) and revealed that 74.5% of survey respondents stayed from the pre-debate panel at 8:30 p.m. through the post-debate wrap up at 11 p.m. and 51% attended two or more Watch Parties. Of the respondents, 41.2% identified as current Hostos students, 23.5% administrators or staff, 29.4% Hostos faculty, and 5.9% indicated Other (and were likely Hostos alumni). We wanted to know why people
attended; 41% of survey respondents were looking for space to be a part of a larger community, which took on greater importance this election year with social distancing and the continuing pandemic. Support for faculty participants and
student panelists was another main reason people attended (35.3%) and 17.6% said
they attended for extra credit.
Zoom webinars are ideal for campus events with larger audiences but typically, a panel speaks to an audience and webinar attendees do not interact with one another. We leveraged Zoom webinar to build an online community from the bottom up with student-centered panels and an active Zoom Chat. These events proved to
be very successful in ways both anticipated and unanticipated. We reflect on what we learned about our efforts to encourage civicengagement and ways to connect students with each other and the Hostos community at large in the midst of an exceptionally difficult year characterized by the global pandemic, social distancing, political tumult, and the 2020 Census and 2020 Election.
Collaborative Promotion
Virtual community building takes the best community organizing and public relations practices and puts them to the test. Our Communications Office created graphic assets and shared them on the College’s Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter pages. For the second Watch Party, student panelists utilized their early college social media account to promote the events. An early college student and burgeoning influencer explained why it was important to attend and get involved in political action outside of voting. The energy from our dual enrolled students was evidenced from the bottom up and top down with the program director and
academic coordinator promoting the Watch Parties to all teaching faculty and from students creating multimedia content in their classes to tell their friends and family to vote.
We also wanted to create opportunities for faculty to link the Debate Watch Parties to their course learning objectives so we collaborated with a group of Hostos Librarians who were doing amazing work on Hostos Library’s online guide, VOTE!, especially Associate Professor Haruko Yamauchi who led the effort, and we created several short assignments that could be used across disciplines and were linked to liberal arts learning outcomes. Assistant Professor Linda Miles led efforts to create 1-pagers that were distributed to faculty through the Office of Academic Affairs before the second and third Watch Parties and Professor Yamauchi added them to VOTE!. Our core planning team personally reached out to colleagues, unit coordinators, and department chairs who promoted the Watch Parties within their respective areas.
Several faculty provided opportunities for students to earn points and to connect with each other outside the classroom. Nearly a quarter (23.5%) of survey
respondents said they completed an extra credit or class assignment but many came back to subsequent Debate Watch Parties without the incentive of class points.
Co-Create with Hostos Alumni and Students
Our first panel included four faculty and staff (one of whom was a Hostos alumna) and one current student, our Student Government Association (SGA) President, who Zoomed in from work. The informal feedback from the first panel was very positive and we decided to create entirely student and alumni panels
for subsequent Watch Parties with the three of us actively participating as co- moderators and panelists.
We did not have to look farther than our alumni to find our cultural and social capital and a global community. The highlights of the Watch Parties were our student and alumni panelists hailing from Nigeria, Dominican Republic, Mexico, the Bronx, Puerto Rico, and The Gambia, to name a few places. Our VP Debate panelists were all-female. Some were adult learners. All panelists shared their passion for student leadership, community organizing, civic engagement, and service. Several panelists could not vote; we intentionally created diverse panels so that we could talk about the 2020 Census and other ways to be engaged in local politics and/or with community organizations.
We did not want aversion to the 2020 Election or to the candidates, two aging white men, to detract from our efforts to bring the community together, so we strove to make the 30-minute pre-debate panel the “main” event followed by the debates and Chat. To increase the comfort level of student panelists, we pre- circulated a script and asked for their feedback. What questions did they want to answer? ? What did they want attendees to takeaway? What issues
were important to them? Then, we rehearsed so every panelist was comfortable with the format. We made mistakes and we laughed. The process of organizing the Watch Parties became a powerful space to create community among the organizers and with alumni and students.
Democratic Dialogue
At the start of the webinar and before the live stream of the debate, we set out the ground rules for Chat. Throughout the livestream, we asked the attendees questions to promote open dialogue, and the moderators and panelists responded continuously to attendee questions and commentary, and added commentary.
There were few, if any, silences in Chat.
Zoom Chat leveled the playing field between students, faculty, and staff. Due to the nature of Zoom, only attendees’ first and last names were visible so most students did not realize they were replying to an Associate Dean’s remark or
laughing alongside a department chair. We encouraged a robust dialogue and our attendees’ quips, comments, and critiques rivaled those on major networks and social media. As organizers, we had plans and backup plans in case the Chat became a space for hate speech, racism, and/or disrespect, particularly since our
Zoom Webinars were open and promoted across CUNY and elsewhere; fortunately,
we did not have a single incident.
Action Items and Calls for Action
We focused on the 2020 Census during the first Watch Party providing information in the pre-debate slideshow, on the panel, and in Chat. We urged attendees to fill out the Census and to ask friends and family if they completed the Census. When the Census was abruptly ended, our call to action for the second Watch Party, the Vice Presidential Debate, was early voting and getting involved in local community boards, particularly since we had a large Early College presence. When the second Presidential Debate was cancelled (what would have been our third Debate Watch Party) after then-President Donald Trump tested positive for coronavirus, we focused on the ballot itself for the third and final event and sought panelists that were very involved in New York City politics and service. Throughout all three events, we utilized national graphic assets and social media hashtags including #earlyvoting, #ballotready, #voteplans and being #pollready.
A majority of survey respondents (58.8%) indicated that they learned something new about the census, voter registration, early voting, and/or ways to get involved in their community and 66.7% stated they did something differently as a result
of attending one or more Watch Parties. Given the diverse survey respondents, a mixture of students (41.2%), faculty (29.4%), and administrators and staff (23.5%), it is impressive that ⅔ of respondents embraced our calls to action and created their own! Some of the unanticipated effects of the Watch Parties included multimedia content, networking between alumni and our Alumni Relations Office, a proposal for a new Political Discourse Club, and invitations to local events via one of the alumni panelists.
Three-quarters of survey respondents are interested in attending local election events, so the first follow-up email to attendees included links to information about New York City’s special elections, primary, and election. We plan to utilize the Debate Watch Party format for the 2021 New York City mayoral debates.
Data Collection and Post-Event Outreach
We wanted to avoid a one and done event. The Zoom attendee lists provided us with new contact lists. Attendees who attended one Watch Party, two Watch Parties, and all three Watch Parties were emailed as cohorts with a message of thanks, next steps, and an invitation to complete our post-event survey. The survey provided valuable information regarding the utility of the Watch Parties and a snapshot of
participants. A new core that included 48 faculty, staff, and students who attended multiple Watch Parties emerged as a group that is not part of any one committee or entity but exhibited an extraordinary commitment to this digital community.
We created short post-election reflection activities and shared on the Hostos Lincoln Academy Early College’s website and in Hostos’ Lib Guide VOTE! We connected with our Counseling Center, anticipating increased need for services in the days following the election and the uncertainty as votes were laboriously counted. We supported Student Leadership as it hosted one of our Watch Party alumni panelists and we sought ways to continue to connect across disciplinary silos. We also sought to showcase student work; Rocio Rayo created a page on Hostos Lincoln Academy’s website with two activities: The Worry Box and the Five Word Novel.
The three of us formed our own band and worked through a variety of setbacks, delays, and a debate cancellation. We located allies in various sectors of the campus, leveraged relationships with different campus entities, particularly Library faculty, and operated using the same kind of grassroots activism that is part of our institutional culture.
Conclusion
Despite the upheaval of the pandemic and an online semester, our Debate Watch Parties opened new avenues for civic engagement, community building, and action. Two-thirds of the survey respondents indicated that they had engaged with someone else after attending a Watch Party, by sharing their vote plan or speaking to friends, family or colleagues about the election; this is evidence of mobilization and the Hostos spirit moving through Zoom spaces into other spaces.
One of the unexpected products of this built community was the cross pollination of ideas that bloomed across committees and programs. There were several initiatives that were happening at the same time that dovetailed together and exemplified how cooperation can strengthen the structure of a community. Instead of several separate, tangential initiatives--the online Library resources, Professor Rafael Mejia’s Get Out the Vote videos, the Debate Watch Parties, the census initiatives, and the expertise of the Behavioral and Social Sciences faculty--an organic hub grew from the Debate Watch Party team where those initiatives could intersect and grow outside of the siloed nature of higher education effectively engaging and mobilizing a civically engaged online community.