BACKGROUND

No idea has animated our work more than the Green New Deal, the legislation that upended U.S. politics in 2018 thanks to the efforts of movement organizers and the leaders they helped elect.

We see links between our founding document, The Leap Manifesto and the Green New Deal (GND) — but this time, on steroids. The Green New Deal is a justice-based plan to take on the crises of climate change, racism and inequality simultaneously and at scale — and starting in 2019 we threw all of our weight behind it.

Our work on the GND includes an animated explainer video, and a social media series on lessons from the 1930’s New Deal for today; Maya Menezes and Avi Lewis’ first-ever Change Everything podcast episode explores the plan, with The Sunrise Movement’s Varshini Prakash.

We worked with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, The Intercept and an amazing team of artists to create A Message from the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a seven-minute animated film that imagines everyday life on the other side of a Green New Deal. It has been viewed over 12 million times worldwide, nominated for an Emmy, and became the opening act for The Sunrise Movement’s 250-city Road to a Green New Deal tour in 2019.

In Canada, we launched our own sold out cross-country tour — A Green New Deal for All — featuring dozens of amazing speakers, musicians and movement partners, to build momentum around Green New Deal organizing. Later that year, our co-founder Naomi Klein launched her book On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal, and we hosted a Book Club and series of webinars exploring different themes in the book.

At the end of 2019, we began building partnerships with unions from key sectors that would be transformed by a Green New Deal — like transit, housing, nursing and farming — to develop their own plans to reimagine their workplaces. That work was upended by COVID-19, but we’ve been heartened to see it continue in other ways. We remain convinced that worker-led visions will be integral to the successful roll-out of Green New Deal programs.