what is passion framing?
Passion framing is a framework to train non-traditional voters to center civic engagement in their communities by connecting the issues they care about to the political seats and decision-making powers. The use of passion framing presents a sustainable way to engage voters, not just for an election, but for a lifetime.
Passion framing is a way for us to deconstruct how we’ve been conditioned to participate in elections. We are taught to simply care about the candidate, and support candidates who are likeable or charismatic. By socializing people to participate in elections this way, this impacts a person’s ability to vote in alignment with their community’s needs and ultimately hold elected officials accountable.
If you understand the nature of someone’s job and the scope of their work, you can hold them accountable in different ways and vote in a way that aligns with your needs and your community’s needs. Folks who understand the power of a seat can ask the right questions and lobby the right people to create change because they ultimately understand who holds the decision-making power to create change for their community.
when was it created?
Passion Framing was created in 2010 by Christin ‘Cici’ Battle. As a YP4 Fellow, Cici developed passion framing as framework to encourage her campus community at Florida International University (FIU) to sustainably engage in the electoral process.
Young people on Cici’s college campus, did not seem care about who was elected or what happened on the city and state level of government because they did not understand the impact these elected officials had on their lives on campus. Students did not understand how the local government in Miami interacted with the federal and state governments, and thus students on campus weren’t engaged in the critical gubernatorial election happening at the time.
Cici facilitated the first passion framing workshop series in 2010, where she brought local elected officials onto campus to make connections between the things happening on campus to the powers of the political seats in local government. In one workshop, City Manager Russel Beneford explained how local property taxes correlated directly with the price of dorm fees and it clicked for students. The decisions this local city manager made impacted whether students had access to affordable housing. Understanding this connection, young people in these workshops started to care, question the powers local elected officials held, and ultimately, engage in the local electoral process.
By connecting the micro-issues that people are upset about at the moment to the political seat, passion framing provides an entry point to understanding the entire political web.
how has it been used?
Passion framing training allows facilitators to get people to care about who occupies a seat because of the powers that seat holds, not just because the candidate is likeable or not. This framework leads to sustainable civic engage practices by empowering non-traditional voters to engage their community for the long-term, rather than for one election cycle.
Cici’s Passion Framing framework has been used by Campus Vote Project, Campus Election Engagement Project, and Young People For to train thousands of young people across 30 states, territories, and 3 countries.