Podcast with Naina Agrawal-Hardin on sunrise movement and climate activism

How does a decentralized youth movement with 500 local hubs coordinate climate action at the national level without losing its grassroots soul? Naina Agrawal-Hardin, organizer with the Sunrise Movement and the US Youth Climate Strike Coalition, reveals the architecture of "power with" , and why radical decentralization is both the movement's greatest strength and its hardest challenge. Subscribe and follow for more from this series on real-world collaboration. Naina Agrawal-Hardin joins Paul Verschure and Jenna Bednar to explain how the Sunrise Movement , the youth-led organization behind the Green New Deal's entry into mainstream American politics , actually functions as a collaborative system. Drawing on her experience as a political and partnership strategist, Agrawal-Hardin describes a structure where over 500 autonomous local hubs organize under shared principles while a national staff coordinates strategy, campaigns, and relationships with federal policymakers including the Biden administration. The conversation centers on a fundamental tension in large-scale collaboration: how to maintain coherence without hierarchy. Agrawal-Hardin distinguishes between "power over" and "power with," explaining that Sunrise deliberately builds collective power among young people rather than concentrating authority. Local hubs develop their own demands, share strategies with each other, and retain autonomy over their campaigns. National leadership provides infrastructure and strategic direction but does not presume to know local contexts better than the people living in them. The discussion reveals how conflict resolution, communication breakdowns, and the challenge of proximity to political power create real friction between grassroots organizers and national staff. Agrawal-Hardin is candid about moments when the national organization has been too directive or insufficiently transparent, and how feedback loops and open calls with grassroots leaders have been used to repair trust. Her personal trajectory , from rural roots in Bihar and Appalachia to organizing at the national level as a teenager , illustrates how lived experience with climate vulnerability drives collaborative commitment. Key topics include the theory of change combining people power and political power, how decentralized movements maintain strategic coherence, the role of storytelling and shared narrative in sustaining collaboration, conflict between local autonomy and national coordination, and why the Green New Deal represents a vision broad enough to unite diverse communities around climate action. Part of the Ernst Strüngmann Forum series on Collaboration, produced with the Convergent Science Network.