MILLEDGEVILLE, Ga. — Residents of Milledgeville and Baldwin County should prepare themselves to vote dangerously this fall.

For the second consecutive year the Twin Lakes Library System has been awarded a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s annual Knight Cities Challenge. Last year’s funding helped create the Milledgeville Democracy Lab, which aims to promote civic engagement in the community, and this year’s winning project, an offshoot of the lab, has been dubbed “The Year of Voting Dangerously.”

The latest project, a product of a $12,000 grant, invites locals to have their voices heard through pop-up voting booths on current events in Milledgeville and Baldwin County.

“We are very happy,” said Twin Lakes Library System Director Stephen Houser. “I’m personally very happy for our library and the Democracy Lab project. We are excited to try new ways of engaging the citizens of Milledgeville and Baldwin County. To be selected as one of 33 winners amongst 4,000-plus applicants is pretty impressive, and to do it two years in a row — I don’t really know how we pulled it off.”

Houser said the mobile voting booth idea is a good middle ground between having people come to the library and the Democracy Lab members themselves going out into neighborhoods or public spaces to conduct surveys.

“I felt like we wanted a way to engage people who maybe weren’t coming to the library directly — to get their opinion on their communities, their feelings about the neighborhoods they live in, the way their lives are going, and their level of involvement in democratic activities. This idea to us seemed like an effective way of achieving that without sending out surveys or going door-to-door. We don’t have the resources for that.”

Windstream has donated two converted payphone booths to the project, one of which will most likely remain at the Mary Vinson Memorial Library while the other makes its way throughout the community.

“Since we have two, we’re probably going to have one here permanently and the other we’ll try to move around the city and the county into different neighborhoods,” Houser said. “We want to not only get this feedback, but activate public spaces and see if people can have encounters around the pop-up voting booth.”

Plans are to test the voting booths in August and formally launch them into action in the fall.

“We are looking forward to seeing what locations and neighborhoods we get the most response from,” Houser added. “We’d be happy with around 50 responses per month, on average, but we’re not quite sure what to expect.”

This year’s Knight Cities Challenge awarded $5 million to projects not just in the southeast, but also across the entire United States. Any individual, business, government or nonprofit entity may apply for funding for a project through the Knight Cities Challenge as long as it benefits one of the 26 communities in which Knight invests.

“The Knight Cities Challenge works to uncover the ideas, people and collaborations that help to advance deeper civic engagement and contribute to city success,” said Sam Gill, Knight Foundation vice president for communities and impact in a press release. “The winners join a network of civic innovators who are showing us the ways in which our cities can shape their futures to help solve pressing challenges and create new opportunities.”

Including this year’s winners, the challenge has now awarded funding to more than 100 community civic engagement projects since launching in 2014. 

“These Knight Cities Challenge winners will help to create avenues for people to contribute to their community. Their ideas propose to bring together diverse residents, ensure talent thrives, and connect people to place, giving them a stake in city-building,” said George Abbott, Knight Foundation director for community and national initiatives via press release.