Hey John, Sunrise Principle 6 reads “We ask for help and we give what we can”.
Building a movement takes so many things: time, energy, sacrifice. For so many people, this is simply too much on top of everything else they have going on in their lives.
As part of our commitment to building a movement that is accessible to all, the Principle 6 program offers monthly financial support to ensure volunteer leaders from poor & working class backgrounds are not limited in their ability to hold leadership positions within the movement.
But in order to increase the scope and scale of this program, we need your help.
We’re only going to beat the fossil fuel industry if we are able to build a huge, diverse coalition capable of making demands of our leaders, scaring corporate lobbyists, and electing champions of everyday people to our government. To get there, we’ll have to organize people who have been left behind by our political system, across lines of race and class.
Our country’s political system is ZOOMING towards oligarchy, and that’s partly because most people who can afford to run for office - and stay in office - are rich, and only getting richer.
We’ve had some examples of true servants of the people, like Cori Bush (a nurse), Jamaal Bowman (a school superintendent), or AOC (a bartender). But we’ve also seen the precarity of those representatives, and how hard corporate interests fight against them.
The same goes across movement politics. That’s why we have Principle 6, to make sure we can support poor and working class hubs and members. We won’t end oligarchy or save our futures by mobilizing the same tired coalition, we’ll do it by bringing people into politics who never thought organizing was for them.
In solidarity,
Team Sunrise