Read the full report, Sunrise Reflections, Lessons & Learnings on Multi-Racial, Cross-Class Movement Building, here (Google Doc) or here (PDF). The report was supported through a Microgrant from the Climate Advocacy Labs.
Sunrise Movement is a youth-led movement to stop the climate crisis and create millions of good jobs in the process. Through my organizing work at Sunrise, I’ve been most drawn to the question, “How do we build a multi-racial, cross-class movement to win a Green New Deal?”
I started organizing with Sunrise in January of 2019 and found Sunrise in a moment where I both craved a movement and community of people taking action, but struggled to find a place that wasn’t mostly white people, and/or demanding climate policy that didn’t resonate or excite me.
Sunrise was both the place with bold young people calling out those responsible for this disaster we’re in (fossil fuel executives) and putting forward ambitious visions (Green New Deal) that went beyond carbon taxes and cap and trade policy.
But soon enough, I realized the same flaw that pushed me away from other groups began to show up in Sunrise; it was mostly white kids engaging in the organizing work. As a 20-something-year-old Black woman from Chicago, who saw how powerful a Green New Deal could be for my community, family, and home, I couldn’t figure out why the number of Black volunteers engaged in the hub, or Chicago natives for that matter, was so low. Why hadn’t we built a hub across race and class? What could we do to bring other Black and brown youth into the hub? (I wrestled with some of these questions in a piece, A Letter to White Climate Organizers, written in The Trouble.)
While this personal reckoning was happening within myself, staff and those orbiting closely to the National Organization were also noticing and asking similar questions.
These reflections came to a head in December of 2019, when a Justice, Equality, and Anti-Oppression (JEAO) retreat took place at a retreat center, Earthseed Land Collective, in Durham, North Carolina. A mix of volunteers (including myself) and staff leadership came together to discuss our own relationship with race and class, to discuss and reflect on Sunrise’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats related to JEAO, and chart a path forward. There, the National organization made a commitment (and intervention in our organizing), to multi-racial cross-class movement building. It was not enough to organize young white, and middle to upper-class folks around the climate crisis and Green New Deal; we wanted to take responsibility for building a movement that would recruit, retain, and deeply invest in Black and brown youth membership and leadership as well.
And so, the real question became… how to get there.
Much time has passed since that commitment was made, and much has been learned about our attempts at multi-racial cross-class organizing; where we’ve made strides, where we’ve failed, and where we must go.
The focus of the Climate Advocacy Lab Microgrant will be a deeper dive into those attempts, including the strides, failures, and lessons for moving forward.
First, I open this reflection with a timeline & definitive history of Sunrise, specifically tracking events that have had implications on our organizing across race, class, justice, equity, and anti-oppression.
After, I take each of these core moments and distill the lessons into a list of the core challenges Sunrise has faced around multi-racial, cross-class movement building.
Since Sunrise has also run exciting programs, projects, and created resources to get us closer to multi-racial, cross-class movement, I lay out the things that have worked around building across race and class.
From there, I close with core lessons, learnings, and recommendations, both for Sunrise and for other organizations looking to incorporate multi-racial, cross-class movement building into their strategy, structure, culture, etc.
One final note; though I was a volunteer in Sunrise from January of 2019 - February of 2020, much of my perspective in this report comes from the vantage point of Sunrise’s National Organization. While this means I’ve been able to capture, from the National perspective, much of the learnings around race & class, it also means I’m not fully capturing all the incredible work and learning hubs within our movement have around how they have done the work to build multi-racial, cross-class movements and hubs locally.
Read more on the report Sunrise Reflections, Lessons & Learnings on Multi-Racial, Cross-Class Movement Building here.