Youth-led climate organization launches.
The Sunrise Movement was founded in 2017 as a youth-led climate organization combining electoral work with direct action. Two first-party records give the year: the organization’s own movement timeline (“2017 Sunrise is founded”), and Varshini Prakash’s statement of 7 November 2018, “I founded Sunrise Movement last year”, signed as co-founder. Neither gives a month, so this entry carries year-only precision.
In 2018 Sunrise activists staged a sit-in in the office of House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, alongside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to press for a Green New Deal; the organization describes this as the point at which it reached the national stage, and says hundreds of local hubs launched across the country. The organization’s hub count and budget grew substantially over the following year; the sources cited here do not establish how much of that growth is attributable to the sit-in rather than to other factors, and the figures previously given in this entry for budget and staffing could not be traced to a filing and have been removed.
What Is Not Established Here
The /about/ page cited here does date the founding to 2017 — an earlier audit recorded that
it gave no founding date, and that was wrong. What it gives no trace of is a founder: it names
nobody. Prakash’s founding role rests on her own signed statements, added above, not on that page.
Evan Weber’s co-founding is not established by anything cited here, and his own page records the same gap: the IRS filings that document the organization establish its existence, form, location and finances, not the identity of its founders. He remains referenced by this entry because Sunrise is the subject of his page, but no claim about his role is made.
The month of the founding is not established. This entry previously stated that “published accounts
differ on the month: some date the founding to April 2017 and others to June 2017” — no source
cited here says either, and none was found that does. The filename retains an April date prefix for
URL stability; the entry’s own date field is the year alone.
No cited source gives a number for the participants in the Pelosi office sit-in. The figure “more than one hundred” was previously stated here and has been removed.