Member-only story
This past weekend, I was sitting with some of my friends in the warm sunshine of a beautiful, early-summer’s day. We are all organizers with the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led climate movement aimed at stopping climate change and creating millions of good jobs in the process. We had just finished a good hike, found reprieve at a local bar, and let our bodies and minds recuperate in the warm waters of friendship.
One of the Sunrise Movement’s core principles is that we share our stories. As friends working toward the same, lofty goal, we know that we truly connect when we speak from the heart. Others new to the tenets of the movement tend to resonate with our emotions as we flip through the pages and chapters of our stories. Our collective mindset, encouraged both by UV rays and IPAs, turned toward sharing our own stories of what made us join up with the growing climate movement. Why were we here?
Common to many stories were intense emotions of anger, or of guilt; the former directed towards the status-quo or greedy actors perpetuating the fossil-fuel industry and ruining lives, the latter pointed at oneself for living in a society shouldering the least burden and subsequently exhibiting perhaps the most apathy. As organizers, it’s paramount to our goal that we reflect on our experiences in order to determine how we can reach others. By sharing…
