SUNRISE MOVEMENT EDUCATION FUND

Sunrise launched in Philadelphia with our first national training in June 2017, where we shared our 4-year strategy with 30 leaders from across the youth climate movement.

Over the next year, we held 31 in-person leadership trainings for 537 people, conducted two national speaking tours to educate high schoolers and college students about climate change and our strategy to stop it, established chapters in 15 states, and shut down one of the largest oil & gas lobby meetings in the nation at the Trump Hotel.

Our biggest moment came in November, when we received international press coverage for interrupting the Trump administration’s lone event at the UN climate talks. That same day, we held 25 events across the country to commemorate what our generation has to lose to climate change.

On Tuesday, November 13th, 2018, just one week after the midterm election, 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 Democratic leaders to back a Green New Deal to create millions of good jobs for working class people and to transform our economy away from fossil fuels over the next decade, as science and justice demand. Flanked by Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her proposal for a Select Committee on a Green New Deal, our sit-in made international headlines.

This was no accident. The success of our mobilization was the direct product of our political analysis, our strategy, and our investment in grassroots organizing and political relationships.