About Varshini Prakash
Varshini Prakash is an American Climate Activist best known for being the executive director of the Sunrise Movement, a non-profit she co-founded in 2017.
Varshini Prakash is an American climate activist best known for being the Executive Director of the Sunrise Movement, a non-profit she co-founded in 2017, which advocates for political action on climate change. Prakash was born and raised in Massachusetts to immigrant parents. She first became aware of climate change when she was 11 years old while watching news coverage of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which impacted Chennai, the city where her grandparents lived.
In 2018, she became the Sunrise Movement’s Executive Director after the group organized a protest occupying U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office asking for a congressional task force to address climate change. Prakash advocates for proposals like the Green New Deal as part of her work with the Sunrise Movement. In 2020, Prakash was named as an adviser to Joe Biden’s climate task force. She is also an advisory board member of Climate Power 2020, a group that includes Democrats and activists advocating for increasing American voters’ interest in climate action.
Prakash is co-editor of the book Winning the Green New Deal: Why We Must, How We Can; released in August 2020. The book consists of a collection of essays from leaders and experts championing the Green New Deal—and a detailed playbook for how we can win it—including contributions by leading activists and progressive writers. She is also a contributor to The New Possible: Visions of Our World Beyond Crisis. This book also consists of multiple essays written by a variety of authors in 2020. Each one covers a variety of topics that reflect on the possible action that could be done in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Prakash has also been named on the 2019 Time 100 Next list of emerging global leaders, and was a co-recipient of the Sierra Club John Muir Award in 2019. Her work has been featured in the New Yorker, Democracy Now, TeenVogue, BBC, Washington Post, and more. She was recently named one of the Grist Top 50 Fixers for “people cooking up the boldest, most ambitious solutions to humanity’s biggest challenges”. Varshini
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Sunrise Movement
The Sunrise Movement is a U.S.-based youth movement with the goal of stopping climate change by making it an urgent priority across the country.