Classrooms to Climate Strikes: How Sunrise Movement supported 600 student leaders to build walkout teams

Winning the massive social transformation we need requires millions of ordinary, unorganized people to take on huge, life-transforming responsibilities. They’re ready - people want to do big things in our movements! But they need meaningful support.

In 2020 Sunrise Movement’s Strike Circle program invited thousands of totally new activists to do BIG things, and used limited resources to offer meaningful support at scale. The six-program program created over 600 student groups to plan walkouts on Earth Day. While Covid dampened their plans, hundreds of teams continued to organize well beyond the end of the six weeks. How did this happen? What choices about the training and coaching program supported the ongoing participation of student activists?

Watch this exclusive PowerLabs presentation led by Lou Marchese to discover how Sunrise designed a student walkout program to set up totally new organizers to build strong teams, grow as leaders, and take responsibility for big outcomes.

This presentation was recorded in April 2024.

Presenter

Lou Marchese (they/he) organizes poor and working-class tenants with Bozeman Tenants United, Bozeman, Montana’s citywide tenants union. Previously, Lou has organized for climate justice with Sunrise Movement, where they managed distributed organizing programs to build and develop local chapters.

Sophia Zaia (she/her) is an Associate Consultant at PowerLabs where she specializes in improving the effectiveness of staff and volunteer teams. 

She has experience both leading and coaching self-managing volunteer teams, mid-level teams and senior leadership teams at the Sunrise Movement, on Jessica Cisneros' 2022 campaign for Congress, and in the fossil fuel divestment movement. 

Sophia directed the Sunrise Movement's distributed voter contact program in 2020, resulting in more than six million phone calls made and more than one million postcards sent through efforts organized by a self-managing team of fifty-plus volunteers in their teens and early twenties. You can read more about it here and here.