Sunrise Movement — Training Hub
Summary
The Sunrise Movement’s Training Hub is a youth climate organisation’s published curriculum for onboarding new members, training hub coordinators, and running escalation campaigns in a US context. It is a well-documented working example of hub-and-spoke organising combined with relational one-to-ones, and one of the few large US organising hubs that publishes its training artefacts openly.
Body
https://www.sunrisemovement.org/
Sunrise’s hub-and-spoke structure pairs a national hub (the central staff and the strategy team) with local hubs (campus and city chapters that run their own actions in coordination with national). [source: sunrise-movement-training] The Training Hub publishes the artefacts each role needs: onboarding for new members, hub coordinator training (multi-week curriculum), escalation-campaign planning, and the political-education modules that anchor the group’s theory of change. [source: sunrise-movement-training]
The hub-coordinator curriculum is the most-cited artefact. It treats hub leadership as a learned role with specific weekly rhythms (one-to-ones, hub meetings, escalation prep) rather than as a title. [source: sunrise-movement-training] The relational component is concrete: each hub coordinator is expected to hold a minimum number of one-to-ones per week, with a structured script and a follow-up commitment, and the curriculum includes the script. [source: sunrise-movement-training]
The escalation training pairs civil-disobedience planning with political messaging, which is a distinctive move: an action is not only a tactic but also an opportunity to recruit new supporters, and the training treats the messaging-and-recruitment work as integral to the action rather than as a separate function. [source: sunrise-movement-training] The published artefacts include pre-action briefings, post-action debrief templates, and the political-education decks used in onboarding. [source: sunrise-movement-training]
Sunrise’s curriculum is openly published but is read here as a working example of one organisation’s choices rather than as a universal template. [source: sunrise-movement-training] The hub-and-spoke model is well-suited to a campaign that needs many local actions in coordination; it is poorly suited to a campaign that needs deep local autonomy. [source: sunrise-movement-training] The relational emphasis is well-suited to a youth-led, high-turnover base; it is poorly suited to a campaign whose leadership pipeline is already established. [source: sunrise-movement-training]
Use it for
A working example of hub-and-spoke + relational organising in a US youth climate context; a benchmark for what an openly-published organising curriculum looks like; a teaching artefact for an organiser considering the hub coordinator role.
Related
- affinity-groups
- civic-tech
- coalition-building
- constructive-programme
- digital-security
- distributed-organizing
- framing-and-narrative
- leadership-development
- one-to-ones
- petitions-and-e-campaigning
- public-narrative
Learn more
- On Wikipedia: Sunrise Movement — CC BY-SA 4.0