Inside the Sunrise Movement’s boot camp to train its climate activists
STONY POINT, N.Y. — “When we were taught about the civil rights movement as kids, it was told to us as if a few big marches just happened and then the laws changed,” Emily LaShelle told me last weekend as she smoked a cigarette. Behind her, a group of her peers played Frisbee in a field while the sun set behind them. “But there was so much more work and effort by activists behind the scenes,” she said. “And that’s the kind of work we’re teaching people to be involved in for this movement.
The Sunrise Movement is part of a crop of progressive groups that have sprung up outside the mainstream Democratic Party and have helped to dramatically reshape the left’s agenda, often with minimal infrastructure. At its founding, Sunrise saw itself as solely focused on changing public opinion as an indirect means of pressuring the party’s establishment.
This year’s camp was for 60 full-time organizers who will receive food, housing and a stipend for up to six months, during which they’ll be placed in “movement houses” around the country.video team was expected, too. “It’s fucking insane,” Victoria Fernandez, who’s 26 and another of the movement’s co-founders, said to me about the media coverage—and the organization’s rising status.
That fall, the election of Ocasio-Cortez, and the protest she joined at Pelosi’s office, was a “turning point” for the organization, said Claire Tacherra-Morrison, a 24-year-old University of California, Berkeley graduate who participated in the protest and is now a Sunrise staffer. A year ago, Sunrise had an organized presence in only about a dozen cities. By December, that grew to around 80, and now has reached more than 250. Each city is organized from a “hub,” usually led by regular, part-time volunteers; each hub is autonomous, choosing where and what to protest and whom to endorse in local elections, and volunteers write op-eds and letters to the editor for their local newspapers on behalf of the broader movement.
“This is unlike any other fellowship program,” Tacherra-Morrison said to the Sunrise activists at the opening of the boot camp. A key messaging guideline was “make it hopeful.” As another PowerPoint slide stated, “a winning story needs both a national crisis of historic proportions and a vision that tells us how to beat it.”
Destiney Lee, center right, is 22 and says she was drawn to Sunrise because of its emphasis on diversity and inclusivity. The majority of the activists in its fellowship program identify as persons of color. That said, about two-thirds of the 20 or so activists participating in a management training seminar at the boot camp for those in leadership positions were white women.
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