Getting People to the Polls With Kat Calvin & Spread The Vote

What does it mean in 2024 for an individual to be without a government-issued ID? Some consequences are personal—but some are big-picture, says Kat Calvin, founder and executive director of Spread The Vote. 

“Our goal is to help people get the IDs that they need for life, that they need for jobs, for housing, for healthcare,” she says. For those who may not know where they’ll be sleeping or how they’ll feed their children, having an ID is a step toward feeling legitimate—a registering of their existence as a person. It’s also crucial for engaging civically. According to Spread The Vote, 26 million American adults in the US do not have a photo ID. 

In all 50 states, Spread The Vote works with partners through tabling and referrals to help people get the necessary ID to change their lives. And they don’t stop there: Working with local staff and volunteers, they also teach the why, how, and when of voting, creating specially made voter guides, walking through voter plans, helping people get to the polls—even providing childcare. As new voter ID laws have been enacted across several states since the previous presidential election, this help comes at a crucial time. 

The Power of Local

“I think getting IDs feels very scary, and no one has trained social workers,” Calvin says. “Case managers are not trained in how to get IDs, and they almost never have the funding for it. So we have everyone from Goodwill and the Salvation Army, to little tiny orgs, to literally the L.A. Homeless Services Authority who send people to us.”

Spread The Vote includes on-the-ground staff and volunteers, but especially since the COVID-19 epidemic, they’ve been scaling through training partners, including government agencies, nonprofits, and others on how to set up their own ID operations. 

Calvin says they’re happy to help when asked, but it gets expensive doing the work themselves. Instead, helping local partners with their own ID programs allows more people to gain access to the services those partners provide (like housing) and does it in a way that’s sustainable for those partners as well as Spread The Vote. Partnering with local entities is also a way to build trust with clients. Instead of popping in and out to help people as a relative outsider, their partners are there working within the community all throughout the year, building trust and relationships. So when it comes time to help with the voting process they are a known entity.

The Power of Unlimited Time Off

Sustainability goes both ways in the nonprofit world—without a sustainable work environment, burnout reigns. But Spread The Vote has a low turnover rate, Calvin says, with most of the team having been there since the beginning. The key? Mandatory vacation, flexible schedules, and unlimited time off. Working with single moms early on, Calvin realized they need to be able to take time off when their kids are sick without having to worry about counting days. And that extends to personal time off, too. “We are really, really big on making sure that people take time off,” she says. “I take time off regularly to show folks, but also because I love a vacation. But this work is really exhausting and particularly when you're doing the kind of work where you are on the ground working with unhoused folks every day, working with folks who are in really desperate situations every day, it can be really draining and it's really hard.”

Calvin’s philosophy is to hire great people and then give them freedom—and from her track record, it looks like it’s working. “The thing that I always tell my team,” she says, “is that you can either kill yourself for two years and then you have to stop, or you can work at a reasonable pace and take breaks and do this work for 20 years.”

Success and Expansion

One of Spread The Vote’s great success stories is the Vote by Mail and Jail initiative, providing materials and training to help facilitate voting from within a jail. “We know that we can get a high percentage of participants who are incarcerated to vote, which is important every year, but critical this year,” Calvin says. The program has resulted in 79% voter turnout, and Calvin is looking forward to even higher rates as the program expands with more funding.

Spread The Vote is also putting together a year-long program that teaches community leaders how to get IDs for people as well as run a successful nonprofit. “There are so many things that no one ever teaches people about being an executive director, and the finance side, the legal side, the insurance side, or HR—which is huge—and no one thinks about it,” Calvin says. Her aim is to help more people do the kind of work that Spread The Vote is doing, and do it sustainably without burning out. 

Keeping Up Motivation Up

While Calvin may be quick to acknowledge that things look dark in the world—and consequences of the upcoming election will be huge—what keeps her going is focusing on the small, concrete things she and the Spread The Vote team are accomplishing. 

“One of the things we talk about on our staff all the time is, look, maybe the apocalypse is coming, maybe everything's terrible, but we can get someone an ID that will make their lives better and will help them survive whatever is coming much more easily,” she says. The small ways they can help aren’t so small to the people they help, she says. It makes a real, tangible difference in an election—and a world—where every vote counts.

Photo credit @Aaron LaVanchy

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