Hello everyone!

The National Campus & Youth Engagement Team is proud to announce an updated version of the Five Star/All Star Campus for the 2023-2024 school year. There were a variety of changes made to the criteria required for this prestigious distinction in order to provide more attainable and relevant guidelines for how to integrate advocacy into your ACS On Campus chapters. This blog post will review the changes made to the following criteria:

• Collecting 50 petitions instead of 100 petitions– 50 petitions provides a more realistic goal for ACS chapters and allows them to not get overwhelmed with this singular criterion. Nevertheless, we are confident that chapters will have no problem surpassing this number.
• Sending three delegates instead of five to lobby day– We felt that the important part of this criterion was for campuses to get involved with the larger state structure of ACS CAN and advocacy rather than the sheer number of delegates your chapter sent. Therefore, we tried to lower this number in the hopes of emphasizing the previous mentioned goal and to make this task more easily reached.
• Recruit at least 10 ACS CAN members instead of 40– Again, ACS On Campus chapters reported feeling overwhelmed by the high number of members the Five Star Campus designation required. In an effort to make this designation more attainable and shift focus onto other criteria, we lowered this number.
• Rather than having all board members become ACS CAN members, criterion 4 is fulfilled by having an advocacy leader on your campus– This change was made as we feel that it is more important to have someone with the primary role of considering how advocacy can be integrated in chapter events. Additionally, the previous requirement of having a board full of ACS CAN members seemed redundant to criterion 3.
• We removed the criterion that requires participation in the Alliance for Childhood Cancer Action Day. While this is an important initiative that we encourage chapters to get involved with, it did not fit this initiative’s goal of providing a broad and basic structure for how any ACS On Campus chapter could get involved in advocacy.
• We added a criterion for integrating advocacy in at least one of your chapter’s events– This bullet was added as it captures the essence of what this initiative is all about– increasing the presence of advocacy On Campus. This criterion also provides complete flexibility on how advocacy is integrated which allows each chapter to pursue this goal how they see fit.

Overall, we hope you are excited about the updates and changes made to the Five Star/All Star campus criteria. By fulfilling five criteria, your campus will earn the Five Star Campus designation, and by completing all ten, your campus will become an All Star Campus. When your campus has fulfilled the necessary criteria, you can fill out this form to be awarded the appropriate designation. 

We are eager to hear your feedback with the updated criteria and hope you enjoy it!

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact the 2023-24 NCYET Advocacy Chair at [email protected].