Sunrise is building a youth movement to stop climate change and create millions of good jobs in the process.
Our movement, founded entirely by young people under 30, was born out of the failure of establishment leaders to offer solutions that scale to the enormity of the crisis. We are clear-eyed about what our generation needs — massive government intervention to wean our economy off fossil fuels while protecting the communities most harmed by climate change. In other words, the Green New Deal.
One week after the 2018 midterms, over 200 young Sunrisers crowded into Nancy Pelosi’s office and demanded climate leadership at a scale never before seen in history. We called on the next Congress to develop a plan to tackle climate change at the scale and speed that science and justice demand, and back a Green New Deal to create millions of good jobs. Our sit-in made international headlines and injected the Green New Deal in the national discourse, such that it — and climate change — are now unavoidable topics.
The speed with which a government-led transformation of our society has caught the public’s imagination speaks to the power built by Sunrise and our partner organizations. Our strategy in 2019 is to grow public support for the Green New Deal with powerful moral clarity and the three tenets of our strategy are:
1) Build people power in key regions while expanding to new states with significant potential for climate impacts.
2) Build political power by running a national distributed campaign to pressure a critical mass of federal public officials to embrace the Green New Deal.
3) Bring together a People’s Alignment of diverse national and state labor, environmental, racial, social, and economic justice organizations aligned around the need for strong government action to protect the common good.