The Sunrise Movement Rethinks its Approach to Creating Change

The doctor couldn’t understand why Kidus Girma wouldn’t just eat the sandwich. Girma, 26 years old, was starving. He hadn’t eaten anything solid in four days. His vision was blurred, and his heart rate was elevated. His blood-glucose level was potentially deadly. He could barely stand and sit up. As he struggled to explain to the befuddled medical professionals surrounding him that he was on a hunger strike to protest the Biden Administration’s lack of action on climate change, he began to realize his cause was failing.

“I had felt like, maybe if I really push my limits, that’s how we win,” Girma reflected in a recent interview. “I believe that less now.”

Ten days later the hunger strike was over. But the climate crisis was not closer to being solved. The White House hadn’t responded; billions in proposed climate spending remained stuck in limbo in the Senate. Girma and his co-activists had done everything they could to make change happen, but were left wondering where the problem was.

Girma is a member the Sunrise Movement, a six year old youth climate organization that rose to prominence in its short life. Sunrise was founded by environmentalists who wanted to infuse their cause with people power and launched into the desperation of the Trump era. It has been celebrated by the liberal press and praised by top Democrats. It boasts millions in funding from donors and foundations, hundreds of “hubs” across the country, and thousands of volunteers. The group pressured Democratic presidential candidates into embracing their climate agenda, which helped popularize the idea of A Green New DealFor climate and jobs. “They’ve brought new energy and new ambition to the climate community and made a big impact in a short period of time,” says Eric Pooley, senior vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund.

What they haven’t managed to do is win. Sunrise has focused its efforts on ensuring that major climate legislation is enacted at federal level since Democrats gained control of Congress and White House. The Administration allocated $550 billion to climate spending in the Build Back Better Package that was to be the linchpin of President Biden’s agenda, and Sunrise pushed hard to get the bill passed. That historic investment was not realized despite all its efforts. now appears deadThe midterm elections are approaching. Major climate legislation will not be passed if the Democrats lose the House or Senate in November, as most observers predict.

Some critics charge that Sunrise’s recent activism has been more hindrance than help. The group came out against last fall’s bipartisan infrastructure bill, calling it the “Exxon Plan,” even though it contained hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for things like renewable energy and environmental cleanup. Its actions usually target Democrats: chants of “Biden, you coward, fight for us!”; pursuing Senator Kyrsten Sinema to the Boston Marathon; hounding Sinema’s Democratic colleague Joe Manchin at the yacht where he lives in D.C. At the same time, Sunrise has demanded allies take up unpopular positions unrelated to climate, including Palestinian liberation and defunding the police.

Fellow travelers on the left have balked at the group’s radical politics and confrontational tactics. Center-left writer Matt Yglesias called its attacks on Democrats a “total failure to read the political situation,” while the socialist magazine JacobinThe group was criticised for not being in touch the working-class people it claimed to be supporting. Though few are eager to risk the group’s ire for saying so, many professional Democrats believe Sunrise has splintered the environmental movement, alienating potential allies and hurting the image of the broader cause. “There is a usefulness generally to having a left flank,” says a veteran environmental advocate who has worked both inside and outside government. “But by imposing these strict litmus tests, they create a lot of unhelpful division within the environmental community when we need to be all working in the same direction. And the extremism of the way they come at it is the reason that even a lot of moderate, thoughtful people are annoyed with environmentalists.”

For Sunrise, the failure to enact federal climate legislation has prompted a kind of identity crisis—a painful process of sifting through the wreckage and trying to chart a way forward, recognizing that the strategy of the past six years hasn’t delivered results. “It was deeply devastating, honestly, to see the way [Build Back Better] stalled out,” Sunrise’s 28-year-old executive director Varshini Prakash tells TIME. “It’s like, we voted, we marched, we striked, you know? There were like 16-year olds running phone banks. What more do we need to do to win?”

The group has been engaged in a year-long process of collective soul-searching. They have surveyed their members and held high-level strategy discussions to try to create a new blueprint for a world where the Green New Deal, its original animating idea, is not a realistic possibility. The idea, Prakash says, is to “dig in and figure out what we can do differently and better moving forward,” and to “shift our strategy in response to a new political moment.”

Sunrise isn’t the only progressive organization at a crossroads. The Trump years were a golden era of liberal activism. Untold numbers of Americans marched to the streets in protest of political events. Protest, once considered a rebellion, has become mainstream. CBS last year announced a reality TV contest called The Activist hosted by Usher, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, and Julianne Hough—a beyond-parody rendering of activism as little more than chic posturing. (The show was cancelled after a public outcry. The creators of the show apologized for trying to pit causes against others. From the Women’s March to Black Lives Matter to March for Our Lives, many of the movements that flourished during the Trump presidency have faded in the years since. As the Resistance sputters and reality sets in, the activist left now faces a collective reckoning: Why didn’t all that people power result in policy change? All the shouting and marching was just a self-reinforcing liberal echo box? And if that’s not the way to make change happen, what is?

On a Friday in February, the Sunrise Movement’s brain trust gathered to chart the organization’s future. Seven flickering rectangles on a Zoom screen offered seven little windows into the lives of the young and apartment–bound: cluttered floating shelves topped with Bernie posters, barred windows topped with crooked plastic blinds. “The vibe today is, like, let’s get down to business,” says the meeting’s leader, Stevie O’Hanlon, a bespectacled white Pennsylvanian who uses they/them pronouns. “We’re very close, and my orientation is that we should just try and drive to a decision.”

The activists discussed the arguments for and against Sunrise’s possible paths forward. They used a shared Google Doc to do so, using a quick-fire shared patois of youth language and nonprofit jargon. Should they concentrate on a federal push, this one to get Executive action from the Biden Administration? (Pro: Would unify the movement. Con: could lead to further demoralization of the troops. Should they designate certain chapter “hubs” as priority locations to push local governments to take action? (Pro: This would help members to focus. Con: Nonpriority chapters might feel overlooked. Once refined, the arguments and options will be put out to the group’s members, who will weigh in with an online vote this summer.

Sunrise was the result of a similar process. It was a strategic and carefully planned effort right from the beginning. In 2016, Prakash had just graduated from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she’d helped lead a successful three-year campaign to pressure the school’s administration to divest from fossil-fuel companies, the first major public university to do so. She’d cared about the environment since watching An Inconvenient Truth as a teenager, but it was the thrill of the campaign—including a weeklong sit-in at which 34 people were arrested—that got her hooked. “I learned everything about how to feel powerful and have agency in your life,” Prakash says. “Life feels big and meaningless sometimes; you see all this pain all around you. Organizing gave me a sense of power—a sense that ordinary people could come together and do extraordinary things.”

Continue reading: Varshini Prakash’s 2019 TIME 100 Next Profile.

Hoping to turn her passion into a career and her cause into a movement, Prakash and a dozen like-minded friends applied that year to a D.C. “movement incubator,” founded by veterans of Occupy Wall Street. The incubator, called Momentum, trains activists to map out their organization’s structure, strategy, and principles long before they hit the streets. By doing what they call “front loading,” the theory goes, activists can avoid the infighting and aimlessness that often afflicts social movements. The current planning effort is a second front-loading process—a sort of Sunrise 2.0 reboot. “We did a lot to change the politics of the issue, but ultimately it wasn’t enough to win the real legislative and policy changes we wanted to see, and that’s why we need a new plan for the next few years,” says Sunrise’s campaign director, Deirdre Shelly.

The planning process reflects the professionalization of today’s activists, who can draw on a burgeoning academic literature of the theory and practice of movement building. It also has led some critics to charge that Sunrise isn’t authentically “grassroots,” but rather just another grant-funded project stood up by professional environmentalists. The group’s early funding came largely from two liberal foundations, the Rockefeller Family Fund and Wallace Global Fund, and it now boasts an annual budget of $15 million. “Sunrise hopes the media falls for its image of itself as a youth-led grassroots activism for the Green New Deal, springing up naturally,” Scott Walter, president of the conservative Capital Research Center, TelledThe Daily Signal “In fact, the group is a creature of the professional left.”

Manufactured or not, a youth movement for climate action was exactly what environmentalists believed they needed in the wake of the climate fight’s last big legislative failure. In 2009, a bill to create a cap-and-trade system to limit carbon emissions squeaked through the House of Representatives—the first major legislation to address climate change ever to pass a chamber of Congress. The bill was killed in the Democrat led Senate. This triggered intense recriminations. Environmentalists had spent hundreds of millions of money on the push for cap-and trade. They used carefully calibrated arguments and ad campaign positioning it as a pro-business initiative that was easily accepted by most. With the world on fire, they couldn’t afford to fail again.

In 2013, the Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol published a 145-page academic paper analyzing the cap-and-trade bill’s failure. She concluded that environmentalists were too focused on the inside, and had failed to build strong support among the people. Her description of the effort was scathing: “Powerful and very economically secure people look down on the American multitudes with a kind of bemused amazement,” she wrote, “and try to find poll results about public attitudes to wave in front of policymakers.” It was no wonder they’d wilted in the face of corporate antagonism and a GOP energized by the Tea Party. “The political tide can be turned over the next decade only by the creation of a climate-change politics that includes broad popular mobilization on the center left,” Skocpol concluded.

Sunrise’s formation was shaped by the idea that climate policy needed ground troops to succeed: “There were certain roles in the movement ecosystem that weren’t being filled,” Prakash says, so the group was “specifically tailored” to supply what its leaders saw as the “missing piece.” Meanwhile, armed with Skocpol’s insights, which had landed like a grenadeProgressives in environmental advocacy were eager to encourage mobilizations, such as the emerging Sunrise effort.

It was a perfect timingIn other ways. Donald Trump’s election in 2016 sent liberals to the barricades. Then, in 2018, a 15-year-old Swedish girl named Greta Thunberg began leading a “climate strike” that swelled into massive protests around the world. A 28-year-old woman was arrested that June. activist named Alexandria Ocasio-CortezAfter campaigning on the Green New Deal (a plan that promotes environment-and-jobs) in New York City, the unexpected victory of a veteran Democratic lawmaker stunned the political world.

Sunrise’s early attempts to draw attention were a smashing success. In November 2018, the group staged a sit-in in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office to demand that Democrats prioritize climate with their newly won majority. Ocasio-Cortez joined the effort, which attracted a lot of media coverage. Pelosi agreed to create a special climate commission in the next Congress.

Continue reading: Greta Thunberg is TIME’s 2019 Person of the Year.

A group of young activists confronted Dianne Feinstein in California in 2019. She chastised them for pretending to give advice to an experienced politician. The videotaped encounter was a great example of young idealists battling an imperious, condescending Democratic establishment. The result was Saturday Night Live parody, Feinstein, played by Cecily Strong, lectures a group of adorable kids: “I don’t come into your first-grade classroom and knock the Elmer’s glue out of your mouth, do I? So why don’t you stay in your lane and step the f-ck off?”

Major publications published glowing profiles of Sunrise, Prakash was featured on lists of rising leaders, and the Democratic candidates jockeying for the 2020 presidential nomination groveled for the group’s endorsement. It went to Bernie Sanders—One of 20 candidatesto support the Green New Deal. Biden wasn’t among them, however he campaigned on a platform which made climate a top priority. It also promised policies that would be of unprecedented scope to address it. Sunrise won for elevating the issue to the top of Democratic agenda.

But the group has struggled since Trump’s departure. Recent actions, including the September protest at Capitol, where 13 people were arrested, were not well attended and received little coverage. Even the hunger strike did not go viral. Last fall, Sunrise’s D.C. hub BossipIt was a rally for voting rights because it included pro Israel Jewish groups. This led to accusations of antisemitism, which even Ocasio Cortez had to distance herself from.

Sunrise’s focus on “moral action” to heighten the stakes of conflict, and its militancy toward fellow Democrats, strike many in the party as unhelpful; what’s really stopping climate legislation, they argue, is Republican opposition. Manchin appeared to be happy to appeal to his conservative constituents, rather than being annoyed by the young climate activists who were staying at his houseboat.

Other Trump-era movementsSimilar struggles have been faced by others. The eponymous organization behind the Women’s March devolved into feuding over leadership disputes and accusations of antisemitism, and is now all but defunct. Time’s Up, founded in the wake of the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment, faces similar turmoil amid charges it prioritized powerful allies, like former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, over abuse victims. The national Black Lives Matter organization received nearly $90 million in donations in the wake of 2020’s massive racial-justice protests, but its founders are now at odds over accusations of profiteering. The movement’s main cause has been abandoned. The federal police-reform bill is dead. Many elected Democrats have shied away from the issue, fearful of being linked with calls to defund the police. The public opposition to Black Lives Matter has grown more than ever before in 2019.

Social movements are not without their struggles over tactics. Tensions between incrementalists or radicals are a perennial feature, according to Omar Wasow (a Pomona College political science professor who studies protests). Public protest—the right of the people to petition the government directly—is a hallowed tradition built into the Constitution. Social media and smartphone footage have made it possible for activists to document injustices, stage attention-getting confrontations against the powerful, and drive public attention to these issues and shape the national agenda. And while it’s easy for critics to deride so-called hashtag activism as mere virtue signaling, Wasow points out that protest is performance. “All politics is in some ways a form of theater,” he says, “and every activist is engaged in a strategic effort to get attention for their cause.”

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Sunrise asserts that it has succeeded in this area. Stevie O’Hanlon, the Sunrise staffer, recalls going through an early training session around the time of the group’s founding that included a slide showing climate change was voters’ 21st most important issue. “We needed to close the urgency gap, because people thought of climate change as an issue in the future, not today,” they say. According to polling, climate is a top priority for Democrats and a lesser priority for the general public.

“The climate movement has won on the problem,” O’Hanlon says. “The next task is, How do we win on the solution? How can we build public support for the Green New Deal solution? We have to build the political muscle to be able to show up in a more powerful way around the next big climate policy fight.”

Sunrise is the way forward may be to focus on tangible local action and small-scale victories—like getting more left-wing Democrats elected to Congress. On Feb. 23, Sunrise volunteers from around the country gathered for a “virtual phone bank” for Jessica Cisneros, a Texas congressional candidate in the March 1 Democratic primary. “If you’re here because you want to get hype about electing Green New Deal champions like Jessica Cisneros,” says the session’s leader, a San Antonio–based organizer named Paris Moran whose center-parted long black hair evokes Ocasio-Cortez’s, “you’re in the right place!”

Cisneros, a 28 year-old immigration lawyer, seeks to oust Representative Henry Cuellar (a long-serving moderate Democrat). In 2020, she ran for the Laredo-based congressional seat. She promised to champion Medicare for All, and to link up with the so called Squad of far-left Democrats. This has grown to include six members from the 222-member caucus. Cuellar claims his conservative stances on social problems are more in line to his predominantly Latino district. Cuellar won the 2020 primary by 1.5 percentage points over Cisneros.

This year, Cisneros hopes her enhanced name recognition, as well as a mysterious recent FBI raid of Cuellar’s home and office, will push her over the edge. “I’m taking on Big Oil’s favorite Democrat, all these big corporate special interests’ favorite Democrat, someone who’s been in office longer than I’ve been alive!” Cisneros exhorts the group. Zoom tally shows 85 participants. Many have added their pronouns to their screen names, and others have acknowledged Indigenous land in chat. “Last time, we debunked so many myths that said change wasn’t possible,” she says. “This time around, we’re finishing what we started!”

Continue reading: The Pandemic Remade Every Corner of Society. Now It’s Climate’s Turn.

Sunrise claims that its members made over 700,000 calls to Cisneros during the days leading up the primary. Cuellar finished second by 767 votes. She also received fewer votes in 2020 than she did in 2020. The two candidates will be facing off in a May runoff, since neither received a majority.

Sunrise officials warn that Democrats risk losing the youth vote to disillusionment and despair if they don’t act fast on climate. “It’s really hard for us in the midterms to go back to our base and say, ‘Vote for Democrats! I know you worked really hard last time and thought maybe they would do something; they didn’t, sorry, but can you please just vote for them again?’” says Shelly, the campaign director.

More and more of Sunrise’s local chapters are looking for alternatives to federal action, pushing climate policy in their city councils, county commissions, and state legislatures, where a small group of passionate and determined people stand a better chance of turning the tide. The hub in Portland has backed a municipal transit initiative. Students in high school and college are looking for ways to get their educational institutions to take action. “People feel really excited about taking this fight beyond Congress to our communities,” Prakash says.

Yet for all its soul-searching, one thing Sunrise does not appear to be reconsidering is the philosophy that has drawn so much criticism—its core tactic of moral confrontation, primarily targeting Democrats. Veekas Ashoka, who co-leads the group’s New York City hub, calls Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic majority leader, “the most responsive politician in leadership in D.C.,” and credits him with making a Civilian Climate Corps a major element of Build Back Better. Sunrise is on weekly strategy calls with Schumer’s office. Still, on March 14, Sunrise NYC protested outside Schumer’s Brooklyn home.

The Resistance may fade away, with the public backlash causing them to cease to exist. Sunrise and other groups will likely pay the price for their tactics. If so, their activists will be replaced by a generation of disillusioned people whose ideals have been shredded by an inexorable system. Perhaps they will be motivated to do the important work in their communities, leading to increased local involvement and a new engaged citizenry. “We’re all really screwed if we don’t solve the climate crisis, but it’s also really scary for the future of democracy,” Prakash says. “What creates the breeding ground for authoritarianism is people believing that our institutions cannot create material changes in their lives.”

For now, activists are content with small victories. “After BBB was put on ice, there was a lot of despair and a feeling like it’s all over,” says Girma, the hunger striker, who’s gone from volunteer to full-time staffer at Sunrise. After his hunger strike ended, Girma and others began “bird-dogging” Manchin, the West Virginia Senator whose objections tanked the BBB legislation. They followed him from his D.C. houseboat to a parking garage, where they discovered that he drove a Maserati—a revelation that generated a fresh viral wave of anger. They didn’t get Manchin’s vote, but, Girma notes with satisfaction, “After our action, he stopped driving his Maserati.”

In the wake of the bill’s failure, Girma thought hard about what he was doing and why. He thought back to the doctor who gave him the sandwich. After he’d gotten a bag of IV fluids and revived somewhat, he remembered, he had a long conversation with her, and she ended up wishing him luck. Maybe, he decided, organizing was about moments like that—-intimate, human interactions, not pompous politicians or bills in Congress.

“It’s really fun and ageist for people in the media and corporate establishment to disregard young people’s ideals and conviction,” he says. “In this moment it feels like we may not win this bill, but I still draw incredible comfort and conviction from knowing who I am and what I’m building.”

In my conversations with Sunrise staffers, volunteers and volunteers, I found that they all referred to the same feeling of fellow feeling: the satisfaction of being part in something greater than themselves. They suggested that activism had become its own reward, providing a sense belonging and commitment. “As a person I’m really small, and before that might have made me feel ineffective,” Girma says. “But now I see that a lot of small people add up to something big, and I feel big in my smallness.” They hadn’t gotten the Green New Deal, but at least they’d gotten that. —Reporting is as easy as 1. Leslie Dickstein and Mariah Espada

Write to Molly Ball [email protected].