I was fourteen when I joined my first Sunrise Movement call: a crash course on the Green New Deal. After the COVID pandemic interrupted my freshman year of high school, Sunrise quickly became the sole object of my free time. I was concerned about climate change and disillusioned with politics. I was in 6th grade when Trump was elected, and as an Asian American son of immigrants, the next four years were deeply radicalizing: I had grown 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 conventional 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.

Four 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 committee of fifteen organizers intended to bring a volunteer perspective to national staff’s functions. 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 operations of Sunrise National. I became lake@sunrisemovement.org and was a colloquial “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, the Hub Council held no 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 for fifty stronger hubs, Hub Council dissented because we believed a movement claiming five hundred hubs should not support ten percent of them, yet the program proceeded without modification.

“Sunrise’s leadership culture lacked the trust in membership which could have brought about democracy”

I recently spoke with Will Lawrence, a Sunrise co-founder, who confirmed my feelings that Sunrise’s internal politics were based on who you knew. He told me stories of how saying the wrong thing could lose you your invite for the next meeting 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 was allowed in the AllHands channel. After Hub Council ended in March, I remained in the Slack channel until September. This was an informal privilege extended due to my involvement in a staff conflict which led to the resignation of a high level staff member. 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 this staff member for their support of this organizing model. As the wheels of Sunrise bureaucracy came to a stop and staff focused on conflict resolution, the broader movement was given virtually no information. Most other Hub Councilors were soon removed from AllHands. If staff decided you were “involved in national,” it justified keeping you on, as if we were applying to college and only the biggest names in the organization would be accepted. There was prestige and notoriety affiliated with national organizing in Sunrise. Volunteers from hubs with Hub Councilors often complained that they felt their hub-mates only accepted the role to use a sunrisemovement.org email.

Democratization and Disillusionment

Around 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 create democratic reforms. As a non-staff member on both the national team and Movement Democracy Project, I was in a unique position with competing interests. I decided to take an inside-outside approach to organizing for democratization. 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 powerful players on both sides, I knew a productive path forward wouldn’t be created through negative interactions. I supported full democratization of Sunrise, but recognized that condescension and hostility would not win democratic concessions. Staff were wrong to hold onto their power, but to win change we needed a power map cognizant of the interests of both sides. 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 paragraphs of dissent. 

As resentment bubbled and confrontations became inevitable, calls were organized for high level staff and the Movement Democracy Project to discuss democracy. These brought hostile Zoom chats from democracy proponents, sometimes targeted at specific staff. This treatment validated existing beliefs of many staff that the Movement Democracy Project consisted of overly-emotional, bad-faith wreckers. I remember texting a pro-democracy staff member after a democracy call and expressing frustration that the verbal attacks were counterproductive to moving forth democratization reforms. However, I sympathized with these volunteers because they had few other options. The inside-outside strategy is not an option for those who have no access to the inside.

Talks of seceding from Sunrise National floated around hubs involved in the Movement Democracy Project. Though conducted in secret, staff soon found out. The word “staff” became political poison in both national volunteer networks and in internal hub politics. There were collaboration calls, and then calls where staff were explicitly not allowed. A subculture of disdain for staff’s unbreakable power 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.

By the fall of 2021, I had moved out of national democratization work 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 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 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. 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 organizers because of its refusal to democratize and relinquish control.

A Justification for Democracy

A movement that relies on mass mobilization and outreach tactics to pursue decarbonization will inevitably develop skilled organizers. Volunteers built 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. 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. Committed volunteers outgrew Sunrise, both in organizing skill and ideological politics. They would weaponize identity distracting from practical matters like legislative strategy, with staff claiming white volunteers were “centering themselves” to discredit a strategy proposal. A movement operating undemocratically masked with layers of liberal deference politics will drive out its best organizers by not allowing their analysis to be considered. Democratizing political strategy would have pushed Sunrise towards prioritizing the winnable local and statewide campaigns advocated for by hubs instead of symbolically engaging with Biden in complex 2021 politics.

My high school hub is still alive because I developed a younger organizer for the past three years who took over when I graduated.

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 hubs in 2021 to just around 100 now). Sunrise needed to take seriously the task of bringing volunteers into national structures to formally empower volunteer organizers to support retention and creation of hubs. I am relatively confident that democracy would have brought implementation of a program like this, by supplying Hub Council with 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 you 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 leaders should be experienced organizers with a vision of how their movement can win. Participation points are not a unit of political power, and organizing necessitates honest assessments of our abilities. When the role a volunteer gets isn’t proportional to their commitment and abilities, the volunteer has ample incentive to quit and find somewhere else to organize. There was no substantive reason why volunteers shouldn’t have been able to be elected to work with the national campaigns 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 strategists. If you don’t give your organizers democracy, you give them disillusionment and a reason to leave.

Participation points are not a unit of political power, and organizing necessitates honest assessments of our abilities.

In fall of 2022, in light of the democratization proposal being ratified, I put together a group of about ten volunteers to build out the national delegate body and democratic structure. We believed that the 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 demographics, as if a process to elect volunteer leaders would be more representative of volunteers if staff were running it. I decided it was not my responsibility to fix a movement where staff refused to give up control over a process democratically approved by volunteers. It’s this experience that makes me grateful to be a member of DSA, where we have a functioning democracy, despite its flaws. Democracy is not a complicated structure, but staff managed to create many versions of something that is ultimately not democracy. I feel for 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 on the plane to the Youth Vs. Fossil Fuels Convergence in Portland, Oregon, which came out of the September 17th NYC Climate March organized by the Center for Biological Diversity, Fridays for Future, the Climate Law Institute, and others. I am not the youngest person in the room anymore, and every attendee seems to be from Sunrise, Fridays for Future, or local groups. The New York City climate march garnered 75,000 attendees and heralded Biden’s creation of the American Climate Corps four days later. Sunrise and other climate organizations claimed it as a movement victory, but this is optimistic at best. 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 addressed in the American Climate Corps program, meant to marginally increase the labor supply for green jobs. Direct action can be strategic if it presents some credible threat to the target or raises the profile of a winnable issue, but no political leverage exists from marching alone. I see the American Climate Corps as an effort to appease “climate voters.”

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 the Build Public Renewables Act’s historic passage in May 2023, the first major statewide Green New Deal victory. The campaign included electing eight DSA legislators, winning primary campaigns that replaced moderate Democrats with socialists, including candidates like Sarahana Shrestha, who ran and won explicitly by making climate and BPRA a core election issue. This was done alongside four years of external pressure and labor coalition building – the “inside-outside” strategy – all within the robust participatory democracy of New York City DSA’s Ecosocialist Working Group, Mid-Hudson Valley DSA, and several other New York chapters.

The universe of youth climate organizing holds misguided belief in the Momentum model and the power of direct action alone. BPRA shows that the climate movement needs electoral gains alongside militant, politicized labor unions to tackle the climate crisis. Only the state can shut down fossil fuel infrastructure, phase out oil and gas development, and invest billions in renewable energy. Given that youth organizing is mostly done by full-time students unlikely to intervene in labor organizing in strategic industries yet, this leaves electoral contestation as a potential arena of struggle.

DSA has proven itself as the climate organization with complex repertoires of electoral, labor, legislative, and direct action organizing. However, young people are largely missing from this, and it is an open question how tens or hundreds of thousands of young people can be activated for climate organizing. I currently organize on the DSA Green New Deal Steering Committee, but I am eighteen and see my obligation to organize with young people, as one myself. I would love to rebuild the youth climate movement into a movement of thousands serious about power. Massive political potential exists on college campuses. This is a site of struggle we have little institutional knowledge for, but the political malleability of students, density of living, and communal social fabric present distinct opportunities for building a mass movement.

The youth climate left needs an understanding of our terrain and a new set of tools to contest for political power. It would need to break the hegemony of the Momentum model and instead integrate electoral, labor, legislative, and direct action organizing as strategic, carefully selected components of campaigns rather than independent expressions of political demands. 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 and structure that will excite and politicize thousands of disillusioned young people. Looking forward, it is surely a task for YDSA (the youth student section of DSA).

After four years of organizing, I am hopeful precisely because I accept that years of hard, perhaps mundane work lie ahead. 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.

Lake is a first-year from Troy, Michigan, intending to study politics. He is a member of DSA and organizes with Princeton YDSA. He is open to chat with anyone for a Green New Deal, and about getting involved in political organizing. Lake can be reached at lakeliao@princeton.edu.