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It’s always darkest ...
Sunrise Worcester takes the climate advocacy stage VEER MUDAMBI
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WORCESTERMAGAZINE.COM
J A N U A RY 14 - 20, 2021
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n less than a year, Sunrise Worcester has swiftly grown “from an organization in limbo,” said Hub Coordinator Andrew Ahern, to a major force in Worcester County’s climate activism scene. Sunrise Worcester is an organization that almost wasn’t. Formed in early 2019 as a local chapter of the national organization, it only held a few community outreach events before it “fizzled out,” said Hub Coordinator Gwen Weissinger. By the end of 2019, Weissinger and Ahern took the reins of the organization and began to rally a small group of Worcester youth, marking a new dawn for Sunrise Worcester. Momentum was gathering with the first in-person meeting at the beginning of 2020, plans for a major Earth Day event in April, and a revitalized group. “It was a really wonderful turnout at the first meeting,” said Weissinger, “and the group had been feeling a lot of energy about mobilizing for Earth Day.” Then came COVID. All that energy crashed into a wall with the lockdown, leaving the organization in a brief period of stagnancy, Weissinger admitted, before it recovered its momentum. The Earth Day prep had linked Sunrise Worcester with other environmental groups, especially at local colleges. Much of this networking had already been online, easing the transition for the group to move forward on local climate action in Worcester as they had originally planned, albeit remotely. While the Earth Day climate strike was canceled, other aspects of the event were adapted to a virtual forum. “We did a three-day event for Earth Day — education, teach-ins, community buildings and all that type of stuff,” said Ahern. “Ended up having a really good virtual turnout for all three of those days.” Since then, the group has focused on growing membership through online organizing efforts, holding consistent meetings
Sunrise Worcester members Matthew Enriquez and Gwen Weissinger at Crompton Park. ASHLEY GREEN
and highlighting local initiatives where people can get involved. “We are really looking to recruit more youth born and raised in Worcester because we believe this work should be spearheaded by and centered around the people who are experiencing climate change firsthand in the city,” said Weissinger. As the communications coordinator at Worcester State University’s Latino Education Institute and facilitator of its Youth Civics Union, Matthew Enriquez often encourages his students to check out the Sunrise Worcester meetings. “I think they get a lot out of it,” he said. A Worcester native, Enriquez started with Sunrise Boston when he moved to the city for college. In the course of his work for Sunrise Boston, he got in touch with the Worcester arm of Sunrise, along with Ahern and Weissinger, joining up with them when he moved back to Worcester. The way young people, from teenagers to graduate students,
have taken ownership of the climate crisis is what resonated with Ahern as well. “It’s a generational thing,” he said, referring to activists like Greta Thunberg and the founders of the Sunrise Movement, Sara Blazevic and Varshini Prakash. “I very much see it as this is my generation, and the next generation’s, future on the line, which really inspires me and keeps me going.” Taking a job at Mass Audubon in Worcester, where he focuses on climate action and education, Ahern wanted to do more in the larger community and sought out Sunrise Worcester. A mutual acquaintance connected him with Weissinger, newly returned from Colombia. At the time, Weissinger had just finished college “and was kind of smacked with the fact that climate change is a real thing and it felt futile to go into work that didn’t have to do with our changing climate.” So instead of pursuing a higher degree, she opted to travel in South America.
Upon her return, she decided to get involved in community organizing, where she met Ahern, and set about combating that feeling of futility. “Doing activism with people who are passionate about similar things and also your age in your area has been really helpful with that kind of defeatist mentality that can set in,” said Weissinger. And the best place to start, the two decided, was to reinvigorate Sunrise Worcester. “I said, let’s do this, we’re not doing anything else, right?” Ahern laughed. “So let’s do it.” With the group’s renewal, Sunrise Worcester can once again address national issues as they manifest locally, both statewide and the city of Worcester. Where the Sunrise Movement on the whole favors broad goals such as more energy efficiency, more renewables and less fossil fuels, Sunrise Worcester works to see those implemented on a smaller scale. The group advocates for more accessible public transportation
such as the ZeroFare initiative, as well as fighting against investing Worcester tax dollars in more fossil fuel infrastructure. “We know that the city is at least trying to address climate change and sustainability,” said Ahern, referring to the recently unveiled Green Worcester Plan. At the state level, the Massachusetts House and Senate just passed key climate legislation so Sunrise Worcester has been “encouraging people via social media to contact Governor Baker to make him sign that legislation into law.” Currently, Weissinger works for the Regional Environmental Council, a nonprofit that supports local farmers markets in food insecure neighborhoods. “[Food justice] is a huge nexus” for so many different issues, including climate change, she said. “Being able to produce your own food removes a lot of structural barriers for marginalized communities when it comes to food access.” What motivated Enriquez as well is that these marginalized communities are often people of color and disproportionately affected by climate change. “The junction between critical race theory and the climate crisis,” as Enriquez put it, is what motivated his start in activism, echoing a larger shift in climate advocacy that produced groups such as the Sunrise Movement. The prevailing viewpoint is that the scope of the climate crisis can no longer be viewed as solely an environmental issue but one of social justice. “It’s all interconnected,” said Ahern. “We all live under the same atmosphere.” While he admitted the city does a good job of speaking the language of environmental justice, climate advocacy and activism, the city’s approach to the climate crisis lacks a holistic understanding. He feels it doesn’t seem like a priority right now for a variety of reasons. Clearly the pandemic is one of those reasons, but Ahern worries that, “they don’t understand that this is the issue of our times.”
