Reflections: What Went Wrong with the Sunrise Movement
Below is a piece about my time organizing in Sunrise from 2020-2022. I write about how Sunrise's failure to democratize led to its decline, as well as the future of youth climate organizing.
I was fourteen when I joined my first Sunrise Movement call: a crash course on the Green New Deal. Covid had interrupted my freshman year of high school and Sunrise quickly became the sole object of my free time. Concerned about climate change and disillusioned with politics, I wanted to get involved. I was in 6th grade when Trump was elected, and being an Asian American son of immigrants, the next four years were deeply radicalizing. I grew up scrolling past the annual IPCC reports detailing climate change would be irreversible by … 2035? 2030? 2027? My Instagram feed convinced me that something beyond normative political imagination needed to be done, and we couldn’t argue with science. I understood that an unprecedented surge of political power was needed to build a livable future.
Three years later, my political beginnings in Sunrise still cross my mind.
I entered climate politics full throttle through movement organizing in 2020 as the country prepared for the Presidential election. I learned the ropes of electoral, legislative, direct action, and protest organizing as I met hundreds of other young organizers. I founded a Sunrise hub in my school district that organized over 250 hours of phone-banking to flip the 2021 Senate Majority. Turning my frustrations and fears into electoral campaigning gave me determination and hope. With a blue White House, Senate, and House, 2021 seemed to be a new horizon for climate politics. After the 2021 January Georgia Senate runoff election, I became an organizer who went to every Zoom call possible. Being visible and likable was my path into the “real” circles of power of Sunrise. On a call about disassembling the patriarchy in the climate movement, I told a staff member about my hub organizing for the Senate runoff. He seemed impressed, and recommended that I apply for the National Hub Council, a national committee of fifteen volunteer organizers intended to bring a volunteer perspective to national staff’s functions. I was in the right place at the right time. Through this staff member’s informal and internal recommendation, I was accepted and brought into “AllHands.”
Bureaucracy and Power
AllHands was a private Slack channel with the then 100+ national staff and a small number of high-capacity volunteers. I felt like a toddler stumbling into Sunrise’s presidential cabinet, where I became familiar with dozens of staff, the co-founders, and senior leadership. My inclusion conferred automatic authority to represent tens of thousands of Midwestern Sunrisers and a first-hand view into the daily functions of Sunrise National. I became lake@sunrisemovement.org and was colloquially a “national” organizer. I appreciated being brought into the room because I wanted to be treated like a valued member of the Sunrise world.
My first Hub Council task was building a network of Midwest volunteer leaders to open channels of feedback for the national organization. Eager to show results, I acquired and textbanked all 35,000 Midwest Sunrise contacts for an initial Hub Council call, which had over 100 attendees. On the weekly AllHands call, a staff member running Hub Council shouted out my organizing. When the New York Times, Smithsonian National Museum, and other national media reached out to Sunrise to interview youth movement organizers, they were directed to fifteen-year old me: the youngest member of the national team. The recognition I gained from working in AllHands was far beyond what most movement volunteers received, some of whom had been in Sunrise for several years longer than me. I sensed that internal “organizing merit” was earned through results but leveraged through relationships.
I learned that the annual budget was in the tens of millions, how the staff hierarchy distributed power, and just how little information was communicated to volunteers. I developed an understanding that I couldn’t dissent strongly from staff’s views, especially high level staff, if I wanted to be liked. Despite its purpose, Hub Council held no substantive power over staff. Staff departments were supposed to report national proposals to Hub Council for our feedback, but we were ignored. When the organizing team proposed a national support program of fifty stronger hubs, Hub Council dissented because we believed a movement claiming five hundred hubs should not support only a tenth of them, yet the program proceeded without modification.
I recently spoke with Will Lawrence, a Sunrise co-founder, who confirmed my feelings that Sunrise internal politics were based on who you knew. He told me stories of how saying the wrong thing could get you uninvited from the next GCal invite for a sub-committee of a sub-committee. He and Dyanna Jaye (a co-founder and former organizing director) wrote in Convergence Magazine that Sunrise's leadership culture lacked the trust in membership which could have brought about democracy, and instead defaulted to "slogans, communiques, monologues, and instructions" from a small leadership circle to everyone else.
No rules existed for who should and shouldn’t be on the national team. After Hub Council ended in March, I remained in AllHands until September. This was an informal privilege extended due to my involvement in a staff conflict which led to the resignation of a Sunrise co-founder. The situation began with an open letter from the Communications team criticizing the Organizing team’s prioritization of the symbolic, media-worthy moral authority of youth protest instead of deeper structure-based community organizing. In essence, Sunrise was attempting to shift public opinion as an abstract concept over base-building in each hub. The same letter called for the resignation of Dyanna Jaye, Organizing Director, for her support of this organizing style. As the wheels of Sunrise bureaucracy halted to a stop and staff focused on conflict resolution, the broader movement was given virtually no information. Most other Hub Councilors were removed from AllHands. If staff decided you were “involved in national,” it justified keeping you on. There was prestige to national national organizing in Sunrise; I remember being cited as an example of a volunteer involved in national work by a staff member, feeling like my AllHands access and status was safe for a few more months.
Democratization and Disillusionment
In Spring of 2021, a group of volunteers created the Movement Democracy Project to organize for internal transparency and democracy. This was a private Slack channel that would meet and discuss ways to win democratic reforms from staff. As a non-staff member on both the national team and Movement Democracy Project, I was in a unique and self-contradictory position. I decided to take an inside-outside approach to democratization organizing. The volunteers took an outside strategy, posting antagonistic messages in national Slack channels questioning staff choices: our stances on Biden, how Hub Council was chosen, how national support programs were designed, how new staff were hired. Some sympathetic staff acknowledged the growing culture of resentment towards “National” (referring to the national staff team) as an existential problem. I heard stories of regional staff organizers ignoring hubs, or conversely, hub members whose campaigns had been taken over by staff. A friend of mine was leading direct actions in California when staff decided it was enough of a national priority to move into their hands. Sympathetic staff members who talked to their colleagues about the need for democratization were met with responses along the lines of: “We are trained, professional organizers who know more than volunteers. Volunteers can’t be trusted to make decisions for the movement.” Knowing the key players of both sides, I knew a productive path forward wouldn’t be created through antagonistic interactions. I supported full democratization of Sunrise, but recognized that condescension and hostility would not give democratic concessions. Staff were wrong to hold onto their power, however, analogous to external politics, a power map cognizant of the interests and attitudes of both sides was needed. A “revolution from below” for democracy was never possible because, unfortunately, the Movement Democracy Project could not force the hand of staff by posting more Slack messages of dissent.
As resentment bubbled and confrontations became inevitable, staff hosted calls for high level staff and the Movement Democracy Project to discuss transparency and democracy. These brought hostile Zoom chats from proponents of democracy, sometimes targeted at specific staff members. The natural reaction to criticism is defensiveness. This treatment validated existing beliefs of many staff that the Movement Democracy Project consisted solely of overly-emotional, bad-faith wreckers. I remember texting a pro-democracy staff member after one of these calls and expressing frustration that the hostility was counterproductive to winning democratization reforms. And yet, I understood why this felt like the only option for some. The inside-outside strategy is not an option for those who are not inside the circles of power.
Talks of seceding from Sunrise National floated around in hubs involved in the Movement Democracy Project. Though conducted in secret, staff soon found out. The word “staff” became political poison in national volunteer networks. There were normal collaboration calls, and then calls where staff were explicitly not allowed. A subculture of disdain for the unwavering power held by staff was prevalent and continually reinforced as volunteers realized that other hub leaders shared their exact experiences and grievances with staff. I worked with sympathetic staff members and kept them updated on secession discussions, because I felt it would do more damage than good to not optimize our relationships with allies. Aligning with the antagonistic members of the Movement Democracy Project was like protesting outside the DNC, whereas sympathetic staff were 2020 like Bernie delegates.
By the fall of 2021, I had moved out of the national democratization fight and into local organizing, feeling the staff bureaucracy’s grasp on power was not worth my time to contest. In the following year, Sunrise eventually went through an internal DNA 2.0 process that culminated in “democratically” ratifying a new movement bylaws that outlined a democratic structure, with a twelve-person “Volunteer Leadership Team” to be elected by volunteers tasked with governing Sunrise alongside staff. There is nothing concretely preventing the new leadership body from being treated like Hub Council was, but I suppose that remains to be seen. The Movement Democracy Project was a partial success in that it shifted enough staff sentiment to make some form of democratization inevitable. It can be thought of as the climate movement’s impact on the Inflation Reduction Act: a lackluster measure designed to appease a constituency that arguably does not have a net positive effect. This was passed in July 2022, with approximately 700 votes cast nationally. For a movement that once had a universe of 80,000 people, this was a drastic decline and shows the reality of Sunrise’s failures: thousands becoming disillusioned and quitting Sunrise because of the lack of transparency and democracy, student turnover, and a presidential administration displaying low political malleability beyond the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act. Seventeen months later, December 2023, and the Volunteer Leadership Team has still not been elected. A body of ~90 national delegates does exist, which suggests less than one hundred active hubs remaining. I personally know many former Sunrisers who quit precisely because of staff mistreatment, whereas others quit because they became frustrated with being ignored after asking for a voice. Out of the fifteen members of the 2021 national Hub Council, only a few are still involved in Sunrise. This isn’t to say lack of democracy caused the entire membership collapse, but Sunrise did largely lose its most skilled core organizers because of its refusal to democratize and relinquish control.
A Justification for Democracy
A movement that constructs an undefined repertoire of organizing to fully decarbonize the US economy will inevitably develop skilled organizers. Hard times do, in fact, develop strong men. Volunteer members build their own theories of change when they realize that we will not win a Green New Deal by asking for it outside the White House. Climate organizing is up against billions of dollars of capital, which requires novel frameworks and tactics. Those who cared the most about climate politics joined and attempted to create substantive political change. I knew volunteers who mapped Congress down to the math of committee votes and political calculations of who we could move, backed up with direct action and distributed pressure campaigns. When they brought this to the political staff team, the ideas were dismissed wholly, despite being more elaborate, and politically realistic than the campaign plans produced by staff. Tactical rigidity came alongside an aversion towards ideological clarity. Sunrise explicitly has not once called themselves eco-socialists, despite this accurately describing much of the base. I was once on the moderating team of a national call when a political staff member asked our chat how to respond to a question about Sunrise’s feelings towards capitalism. I offered something like “Capitalism is killing the planet and we are against it”, which was the response to the volunteer. This may be the most socialist thing Sunrise has ever officially said. Committed volunteers outgrew Sunrise, both in organizing skill and ideological politics. They would even weaponize identity in purely political matters like a legislative strategy. Staff claimed white volunteers were “centering themselves” as criticism to strategy proposals. You can imagine how a movement without democracy would drive out its best organizers by not allowing their analysis to be considered. Democratizing the political strategy would have been beneficial for setting Sunrise’s tactics towards the direction of prioritizing winnable local and statewide campaigns advocated for by hubs instead of symbolically engaging with Biden in complex 2021 politics.
It is dishonest to cite turnover of high school and college students as a significant or reason for an ~80% decline in the past two years (from over 500 in 2021 to around 100 now). Sunrise needed to take seriously the task of bringing volunteers into national structures to formally empower their best organizers to support retention and creation of hubs. I am relatively confident that democracy would have brought implementation of a program like this, because those of us on Hub Council had a sober view of the membership crisis and why the national movement was shrinking. My high school hub is still alive because I developed a younger organizer for the past three years who took over when I graduated. In addition to democracy, movements need intentional on-ramps for committed members to be challenged with harder work that grows our base. Can you get three of your friends in different cities to start hubs that have fifteen active members within two months? Can you help each hub achieve a material campaign success within six months? If so, there’s no reason this theoretical volunteer shouldn’t be able to run in an election and be given the power to control national growth and development programs.
I believe in merit-based movement credibility because anyone in leadership should be expected to be an experienced organizer with a vision of how their movement can build to win. Organizing necessitates honest assessments of our own and others’ abilities. We can’t accurately understand our collective ability if we don’t accurately understand individuals. If two people are tasked with running recruitment for a hub and one brings in double the amount of new members in the same time period, this should be recognized, and it’s clear who should be learning from the other on the task of recruitment. Comradely, constructive criticism is necessary to develop organizers and build the strongest organization possible. We’re doing ourselves a disservice by pretending the effectiveness of organizing is homogenous across a movement, or rather, that staff are universally more skilled.
Adjacently, when the power and respect a volunteer gets isn’t proportional to their commitment and organizing abilities, the volunteer is probably going to quit and find somewhere else to organize. There was no substantive reason why the volunteer I mentioned shouldn’t have been able to be elected to work with the national political team when they could justify how their power map would lead to results. Staff held onto their ultimate authority and rarely considered how some volunteers might be stronger organizers or strategists. And if you don’t give your best organizers democracy, you give them disillusionment and a reason to leave.
In fall 2022, in light of the democratization proposal being ratified, I spent a few weeks trying to put together a group of volunteers to build out the national delegate body and democratic structure. I put together a team of about ten Sunrise cadre volunteers who held the belief that the process to build a democratic structure for volunteers should be directed by volunteers. Instead, I was told by staff that we could not possibly represent the will of movement volunteers in terms of race, class, geography, and other factors, as if a process to elect volunteer leaders would be more representative of volunteers if staff were running it. I decided it wasn’t my responsibility to fix a movement where staff refused to give up control over a process that was democratically approved by volunteers, designed to give volunteers formal power. In retrospect, It’s experience that makes me grateful to be in DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) now, where we have a functioning democracy, despite its flaws. Democracy is not a complicated concept, but Sunrise managed to create endless versions of something that still is not democracy. I feel for and commend the volunteers who are still working for transparency and democracy in Sunrise, because I remember how hurtful it is to be denied agency over a movement you love.
What’s Next?
I am now a college freshman, and I started writing this piece at the Youth Vs. Fossil Fuels Convergence in Portland, Oregon, a conference that came out of the September 17th NYC Climate March organized by the Center for Biological Diversity, Fridays for Future, the Climate Law Institute, and some local orgs, that I was invited to for being involved with the march. I’m not the youngest person in the room anymore (there are many high schoolers!), and it seems that every attendee is either in Sunrise, Fridays for Future, or local climate orgs. The NYC Climate March, garnering 75,000 attendees, is a telling case study of federal climate politics because Biden signed the American Climate Corps into law four days afterwards. Sunrise and other climate organizations claimed this as a victory, but we should think more critically. The demands of the march were to declare a Climate Emergency, stop new oil and gas leases on public lands, and phase out fossil fuel production, none of which are remotely addressed in the American Climate Corps, which marginally increases the labor supply for green jobs. Direct action can be strategic if it presents some credible threat to the target, but no political leverage exists from marching alone. I see the American Climate Corps as an effort to appease “climate voters” and create the illusion that Biden cares about what these voters think.
The youth climate organizing world is lost in terms of strategy. There is a misguided degree of belief in the potential of direct action, the same orientation I would have towards the original Momentum model, and little thought on electoral intervention.
Sunrise now has a national Green New Deal for Public Schools program and is campaigning to pressure Biden to declare a climate emergency. We should compare this to the new terrain of breakthroughs in climate politics in 2023. Sunrise never really utilized its numbers to run its own organizers for office and build proto-parties like DSA’s in New York that led to Build Public Renewables Act’s passage in May 2023, the first statewide Green New Deal victory that required eight electoral campaigns getting DSA members into the state legislature as well as four years of external pressure and labor coalition building - the “inside-outside” strategy. The contrast here raises clear questions: What does this show about political productivity across movements? How is political imagination and tactical innovation inhibited by the non-profit management model? What does this tell us about the role of contesting state power in the climate movement? How should we quantify political power in the context of organization, and what organizing projects constitute real power? Why has the need to contest local state power not become a consensus priority in the youth left climate?
Beyond the democracy problem, a movement that does not contest for state power cannot make significant legislative gains. A political lesson from BPRA is that the climate movement needs to get serious about both electoral wins and labor organizing, neither of which Sunrise really currently engages in. We should derive our political analysis of tactics from what has worked and won Green New Deal policy. Could you really pass BPRA in a state legislature without any elected officials acting as core proponents?
In 2020, the electoral organizing model was viable because there was a possibility for federal gains. Sunrise threw their support behind Bernie, and even mobilizing for Biden excited young people. Sunrise made over six million calls into swing states for Biden through a distributed phone-banking program. Varshini Prakesh was on the Biden Climate Task Force, and we truly believed a climate president was possible. There was no way to know that Biden would approve even more oil and gas leases than Trump. The momentum didn’t translate to winning the city council, state legislature, and Congressional seats that you might have expected from a $15+ million budget because Sunrise never ran their own electoral candidates to build a climate proto-party. This is sensible because electoral organizing is tedious and often boring. Young and inexperienced organizers especially like to conceptualize activism as moral protest rather than structure-based campaigns. A power map would clearly lay out why it is necessary to pass any legislation, but the national organization was not supporting or asking Sunrise hubs to make power maps and build city council proto-parties of Green New Deal candidates.
Instead, Sunrise has been largely focused on pressure campaigns through direct action against Biden since his election, such as a White House mobilization in summer 2021. After years of trying to believe in the momentum model, I’m unconvinced. Biden has no substantial reason to care what the youth climate movement thinks of him if the general consensus is that these young people will vote for him again to keep Trump out in 2024. While unfortunate, this is how political calculus works. The establishment does not care about our feelings as long as they have our votes.
To clarify, I think we should look towards DSA to understand what it means to build real power for decarbonization. It’s obvious to me that DSA is currently the strongest climate organization in its ability to win results with over 250 elected officials nationally, but the broader, weakly-politicized youth left does not have a central political home for climate organizing the way Sunrise existed in 2020. Winning electoral campaigns at all levels of government is necessary to win a Green New Deal and decarbonize at the speed we need. We need electoral gains alongside militant, politicized labor unions to tackle the climate crisis. Only the state can shut down fossil fuel plants, phase out oil and gas development, and invest billions in renewable energy infrastructure. Yet, the youth climate movement has simply never attempted building these proto-parties as a tactic. Given that mass youth organizing is done by full-time students who cannot intervene in strategic sites of labor organizing yet, this leaves electoral contestation of the state as its logical role. You can say a direct action was a success if it “applied pressure” (whatever that means), but you can’t pretend an election was a success if you don’t win. Confirmed by my current research on activated climate left, most young climate organizers do not meaningfully understand where the climate movement has made quantifiable gains.Very few know the tactics behind campaigns like BPRA. Most do not even know what the legislation does.
Looking to 2024, there is little potential for positive electoral engagement at the federal level. Young people are overwhelmingly disillusioned with Biden after the Willow Project, Mountain Valley Pipeline, and countless other environmental atrocities, but the DNC will likely not fold on making Biden the nominee.
DSA has proven itself as the climate organization with its joint repertoires of electoral, labor, legislative, and direct action organizing. However, young people are largely missing from this, and I see it as an open question how tens or hundreds of thousands of young people can be activated for climate again. Caring about climate was an onramp to becoming an eco-socialist for me, but not every young person can be brought from point A to C with ease. Mass politics requires a movement that warmly invites new members to move from A to B, B being basic political activation. B to C is a task for internal membership engagement and political education. What’s the story of mass climate politics in 2024? How can people feel at home and comfortable in a movement? How do climate organizers move thousands from A to B so we can eventually move them from B to C?
These questions fit into the broader ecosystem of open questions for the climate left. What would it take to win a Green New Deal? How did we quantify the power we needed to build, and how many people would that require? How many elected officials? How many ballot measures? How many politicized unions? Countless moments of the last few years like the UAW strike, the Build Public Renewables Act, and expanding Green New Deal blocks in legislatures prove these questions have answers. It is our job as organizers to build more power until we can answer them.
I currently organize on the DSA Green New Deal Campaign Commission, but I am eighteen and realize my obligation to also organize young people, as one myself. As a college freshman, I would love nothing more than to rebuild the youth climate movement into a movement of tens of thousands that is serious about power - both inside and outside the state. I miss the hope I felt in 2020 and the unique feeling of the youth climate movement. I am certain that massive political potential exists in high school and college campuses. This is a site of struggle that we have little institutional knowledge for, but the political malleability of students and density of living are distinctly optimal for mass movement building.
The energy and mobilization of the 2018-2020 years that led to a surge of youth joining Sunrise won’t be possible in the next four years before 2028 presidential primaries unless a new repertoire of contestation is built in the youth climate left. It would need to be something that breaks the hegemony of the Momentum model and instead integrates strategic electoral, labor, legislative, and direct action organizing as components of campaigns rather than independent expressions of political grievance. The climate left now has some institutional knowledge about how to win a Green New Deal in cities and states, so it becomes a question of finding the winning message, culture, and structure to house the winning strategy that will excite and politicize thousands of disillusioned young people. Looking towards the next five years, it is surely a task for YDSA (the youth student section of DSA).
After four years of organizing, I am hopeful precisely because I am comfortable accepting that years of hard, perhaps boring work lie ahead. In a way, politics can be fair and logical: you cannot win without power, and you cannot build power without deep, sustained groundwork - on campuses, in workplaces, and at the ballot box. There are no shortcuts to winning the fight of our lives.
My contact info is lakeliao@princeton.edu by email and @lake_liao on Twitter. If you want to get to work but don’t know how, reach out to me! Or, feel free to book a meeting directly on my Calendly: https://calendly.com/lakeliao .