Black men seeking a shave and a haircut in Philadelphia will now get schooled on their right to vote.
A new project called Sharp Insight, started by the Youth Outreach Adolescent Community Awareness Program, is set to recruit 50 local barbers and train them to share the needed information with customers about how and where to vote.
The hope is that local barbers will be able to help increase voter turnout among Philadelphia’s black men.
“Barbershops are trusted places in the African-American community where black males talk about everything from sports, entertainment, relationships, and even politics,” Duerward Beale, the executive director of YOACAP, explains in a video. Sharp Insight will work with barbers “to cut through misinformation on elections, to educate black men, and to increase their civic engagement.”
The project was started after studies showed that voter turnout in the area is at the lowest point in decades.
Voter turnout is abysmally low in the U.S., and it appears to be getting worse. During last November’s midterm elections, just 36.4 percent of the voting-eligible population showed up to the polls—the lowest turnout since 1942. The U.S. ranks 31st in its voter turnout among 34 developed, democratic countries, according to the Pew Research Center. While black voters turned out in record numbers in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections—exceeding that of whites in 2012 for the first time—those numbers dropped during the 2014 midterm elections. The turnout gap between black men and black women was 7.7 points, with men on the losing end of the equation.
In Philadelphia, voter turnout among black male residents has been on the decline since 2008, according to Beale. “[They] just have a mistrust of the system, of elected officials, because they feel like elected officials have an agenda,” Beale told The Guardian.
The program aims to reach more than 6,000 men through 25 affiliated barbershops, and organizers say those men may then disseminate voting information to more than 15,000 more people in their households and social groups.