2023 KVD Civic Leaders: the Making of a Candidate Questionnaire
Welcome back to the 2023 Civic Summer Internship blog! As we move forward in the creation of this year’s Election Guide, we thought we’d stop to break down a key piece of our process: the making of the candidate questionnaire.
Each KVD Election Guide has a candidate profiles with responses questions drafted and decided on by our team of youth Civic Leadership interns. These responses not only allow youth (and adult) voters to gain a deeper understanding of each person running for office and provide concrete points of comparison between the candidates, but they do so from a uniquely youth perspective.
This year’s Civic Leadership team brainstormed using four different question categories: issue, lived or personal experience, general, and fun.
Issue Questions
Issue Question Brainstorm Board
After deciding which issues we felt were most important to a city election, and therefore which issues to report on in this year’s election guide, our team began brainstorming issue-centric candidate questions.
Choosing only a few questions to include is the hardest part of the process, but after much deliberation, we landed on:
What are your top three priorities, and how would you address each?
How can Durham City Government address the city’s greatest equity challenges?
General Questions
We wanted to use this category of ‘general’ questions to learn about each candidate’s overall motivations and priorities and view of the office they hope to serve, and so decided to ask:
Why are you running for City Council or Mayor?
List up to 10 words that describe your identity.
What is one thing you wish people knew about City Government?
Lived/Personal Experience Questions
Through lived experience questions, we hoped to get a feel for the lived experiences that each candidate has. We looked at many different questions, including those related to the issues we had identified as most important for youth in this election and decided on :
Fun Question Brainstorm Board
Where and how long have you lived in Durham? How has this impacted your outlook on the city’s issues?
Share a specific story about something you’ve learned from young people/a young person.
Tell us about a difficult experience related to a change you want to see in Durham.
Fun Question
I can confidently say that our most lively whole-group discussion yet came from the brainstorming process for this category; all I’ll say is pay close attention to the Jamboard sticky note dealing with monkeys. By design, the fun question is meant to produce authentic and relatable responses for youth audiences while straying from some of that election intensity.
After LOTS of back and forth, we ended up thinking up an entirely new fun question in conversation:
Tell us your best (clean) joke!
Though it didn’t ultimately win out, the question of monkey ownership was eventually honored through a couple sticker designs by our group!.
Only about an hour after the official end to the candidate filing period on Friday, July 21st, our questionnaire went live! Its creation was the biggest of team effort, so it only felt right to hit send together.
6 of the 23 Civic Leadership team members press send on the 2023 Candidate Questionnaire in a message to all candidates
