When you think of goat yoga, you probably imagine goats crawling over you as you slide into downward-facing dog.
Not this time.
Students in St. Petersburg College’s Project Citizen Fellows club with the Center for Civic Learning and Community Engagement held a voter registration event called “Goat to Vote” on Monday.
Only problem: the goats weren’t allowed inside the downtown campus where the yoga class happened.
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— Down dog goat yoga.JPG
At the “Goat to Vote” event, about a dozen people escaped the muggy weather outside to join the hour-long yoga class inside the downtown campus. The goats stayed outside.
Meghan Bowman / WUSF
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— goat yoga ground.JPG
At the “Goat to Vote” event, about a dozen people escaped the muggy weather outside to join the hour-long yoga class inside the downtown campus. The goats stayed outside.
Meghan Bowman / WUSF
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— reaching goat yoga.JPG
At the “Goat to Vote” event, about a dozen people escaped the muggy weather outside to join the hour-long yoga class inside the downtown campus. The goats stayed outside.
Meghan Bowman / WUSF
Carmine and Greta, the voter-support goats, as organizers called them, drew in a crowd. SPC student Harrison Maxwell said that was the point: to get people to stop by the table and check if they’re registered to vote.
He said their target demographic was other students.
“The older you get, the more aware you get. You really start to feel the pain of policy,” Maxwell said. “I think young people also feel it as well, but they don’t realize what’s happening until, perhaps, they get a little older.”
As students came and went, many stopped at the poster board to check their voter registration.
Maxwell just finished six years in the U.S. Marines and is back at SPC to finish his associate’s degree.
“I think ‘Goat to Vote’ is a great attention grabber,” he said. “I think these young people, it’s very important for them to see this process can be fun. It’s not just old people in suits greedily deciding how to destroy your future. We can make a difference.”
A few dozen students stopped by the table to grab snacks and pet the goat duo, who were decked out in scarves that said “Vote.”
Junior Tamarcus Daise stopped to check out the goats, grab a snack, and register to vote.
“This is a really good opportunity for us to like, really get into knowing about voting and getting ready for us to vote,” he said.
This will be his first time voting.
Organizers had nonpartisan voter guides ready for students to take and a huge poster board with a QR code that helped people register to vote or check whether they were already in the system.
Sabrina Wasilewski is a student and member of Project Citizen Fellows, the group that organized the event.
“We just wanted a friendly and fun way to draw in attention (and) also give away free treats to get people really excited.”
The club has another event next week leading up to the midterms, but the goats will stay at the farm for that one.
Courtesy of Tara Newsom
/
St. Petersburg College
Students will hold another event next week to talk about democracy.
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