Lessons, explorations, and challenges in structure from the Sunrise Movement

Since its launch in 2017, the Sunrise Movement has succeeded in pushing climate change onto the national political agenda and mobilizing tens of thousands of youths in local hubs across the United States.

But in recent years, they began experiencing limitations around how the movement was structured – including tensions around engaging local volunteers in national decision-making processes, challenges in base building beyond the movement core, and questions on how to govern democratically as a movement.

With the evolving political and organizing landscape, one thing became clear: the movement needed intentional structures to support their powerful organizing.

And these challenges are not limited to the Sunrise Movement – many movements and organizations are finding that as they grow and adapt, they also need to revisit and redesign the structures they began with.

During this session, we had an incredibly rich conversation around the explorations, lessons, and challenges on movement structures coming out of the long-term project between Sunrise Movement and LCN. We were joined by Dejah Powell from the Sunrise Movement, along with Jake Waxman and Rohit Gawande from the team at Leading Change Network who worked with the Sunrise Team.