Gabriel's fundraiser for Sunrise

Being part of the Sunrise Movement for the past couple years been both the greatest honor and the greatest joy of my entire life. Together, over that period, we have built a movement of thousands of young people, as well as older allies; established hundreds of hubs and developed many of them to be valuable local spaces for climate organizing, powerful voices on behalf of our generation, and key pillars of our rapidly-growing movement; gotten well over a thousand candidates to refuse fossil fuel money; helped elect climate champions to various public offices all across the country; moved the Green New Deal, which is not just the only way to avoid catastrophic climatic disruptions based on scientific reports, including the one recently released by the UN and the one released by the Trump administration itself, but is also our best shot at ensuring justice for the communities that have already been and stand to continue to be most impacted by the climate crisis but have done the least to cause it and at completely eliminating poverty through such programs as a climate jobs guarantee, from some niche policy, advocated by small fringe parties, that nobody in politics could take seriously and few had even heard of to one of the most talked-about ideas in Washington, with the support of many prominent politicians and leading contenders for the Democratic nomination for President in 2020; and fundamentally transformed the conversation around the climate crisis itself, not least by helping to get public discourse about it to actually happen, and also by shifting that discourse to the very real impacts that it is already having, with much worse impacts coming very soon, and the equally real solutions that have been ready to implement for quite a while now, and placing the blame where it belongs: on the handful of greedy fossil fuel billionaires who have been prioritizing their bottom lines over all of the rest of us and actively blocking those solutions. I have been extraordinarily proud to be a small part of all of this amazing work, especially over the past year.

Now, we are getting ready to do even more in the next couple years and train thousands more new members, making our movement even larger; start even more hubs and further enhance existing ones; run speaking tours to bring the Green New Deal to audiences all across the country; run fellowship programs to help young organizers build their skills while doing crucial local movement-building work; and prepare for the 2020 elections, all of that in order to completely transform this country’s politics and make the Green New Deal a reality by 2021. In order to do all of that, we will need a lot of support. Our sixth principle, “We ask for help and we give what we can”, reflects that. For as long as I have been part of Sunrise, I have been giving what I could, and I intend to continue to do so. We have a strong culture of volunteerism, with thousands of other people also giving what they can. However, there are all sorts of expenses associated with everything we have planned for this year and next year. Although our very talented organizers make their best efforts to run a tight ship, and small amounts of money really have been going a long way in our movement, some of these expenses are unavoidable if we are to build the strongest and most effective movement possible. That is why we have to use the first part of Principle 6 by asking for help not only in the form of volunteer labor but also in the form of monetary donations. Our opponents can and do turn to fossil fuel billionaires and get plenty of funding, but we cannot and would not even if we could. Instead, we turn to our communities. Our second principle is “We grow our power through talking to our communities” and one of the many ways we carry that out principle is by talking to our communities to ask for financial support for our efforts to grow our power. Although we do receive some grants, grassroots funding has really been critical to our success thus far and will continue to be an essential source of support for the remainder of the work we do. Monthly donations are especially valuable in consistently sustaining the movement. Any amount that you can donate will go a long way and be very helpful to us, so please just give whatever you can using the form on this page.

If you are not able to donate money but you are able to volunteer with us, that is also very helpful. You can go to https://www.sunrisemovement.org/volunteer to find opportunities to get involved or http://bit.ly/sunrisenycvolunteers for opportunities in NYC.

Thank you.

-Gabriel Reichler, Sunrise NYC volunteer