When I applied to be a Henry M. Jackson Leadership Fellow, I knew I wanted to focus my Fellows Project on precincts and precinct committee officers to strengthen civic participation and democracy.
What I didn’t know was how quickly the year with my cohort and the Foundation would sharpen my thinking—and connect me with the people and institutions to actually make something happen.
The problem was clear: young people are not apathetic, but too often are left without clear on-ramps into politics. We tell them their voices matter, but rarely show them where the entry points are.
Through my fellowship year, I continued working to build the PCO Project in partnership with Teach with TVW. The idea is simple: take one of the most overlooked but important grassroots roles in our democracy—the Precinct Committee Officer (PCO)—and teach high school and college students that they can actually become an elected or appointed PCO. Not in the future, but right now.
We piloted a one-hour civic curriculum across Washington schools, produced teaching materials now available through the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction’s (OSPI) Open Educational Resources hub, and refined it through feedback from both Republican and Democratic leaders.
The response has been encouraging. When students realize they can literally put their name on the ballot while still in high school or college, something clicks. Politics becomes less abstract, more personal—and importantly, within their reach.
This fall, we’re taking the project a step further by launching a 3rd video that explains a PCO’s role in a fairly unknown responsibility: recommending appointments to the state legislature to fill vacant seats.
As part of my fellowship year, the PCO Project published its first official op-ed on the Project for Civic Health’s blog in April. You can read it here:
The long-term vision of the PCO Project is simple: fill every precinct in Washington with a PCO.
The PCO Project started before the fellowship, but the Jackson Fellowship gave me the space and resources to take it further. It turned a scrappy idea into a structured push for bottom-up civic engagement—exactly what our democracy needs.
-Chirag Vedullapalli, 2025 Jackson Fellow