John,

Tomorrow marks one year since I first heard of Sunrise Movement. It happened when I came across a video. In it, I saw what seemed like hundreds of young people, storming through the halls of Congress, demanding a Green New Deal. They were confronting face-to-face the most powerful Democrat in Washington, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

I had no idea ordinary people could just walk into Congress and confront politicians like that. I knew then and there, I needed to join this movement.

That protest could have been a one-off (the Democratic establishment certainly wrote it off as such). But that movement gave me - and thousands of other young people - new hope for my future, and I dove in head first. Since then, we’ve done more than anyone ever expected:

Our movement grew from 20 Sunrise hubs to 260 nationwide.
Hundreds of us showed up to our representatives’ offices across the country to demand they back the Green New Deal. Some of those office visits went viral. [1]
We got major features in Vox, Buzzfeed, Vogue, NBC, Politico, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and more.
Every major 2020 presidential candidate came out in support of the Green New Deal.
Labor unions joined our call for a Green New Deal as well, including the SEIU.
We slept for three nights on the steps of the Democratic National Committee headquarters to demand Democrats hold a #ClimateDebate.
Because the public demand we built for a climate debate, CNN held a climate town hall attended by every major presidential candidate, an event which spanned 7 hours. That one night was more than triple the coverage climate change got throughout the entire year of 2018.
We held 4 regional summits in Detroit, San Francisco, Providence, and Nashville in which we trained over 1300 new leaders in the movement.
We helped organize the September 20th global climate strike, the largest day of climate action in world history.

Our movement is a lot less lonely than it was a year ago. We’ve come a long way, but we have so far still to go. Powerful Democrats haven’t stopped dragging their feet, and now we’re up against the full force of Trump’s hate and fossil fuel CEO cronies. 2020 is going to be so much harder than 2018, or 2019, and we need all of your support to keep growing.

Can you chip in monthly to help our movement keep powering forward throughout 2020 to build the movement and the political leadership that will make the Green New Deal a reality? Or, make a one-time donation here.

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Let's make this next year blow our last out of the water.

Zina Precht-Rodriguez

1. https://twitter.com/sunrisemvmt/status/1099075460649107458?lang=en