What We’ve Learned Building a Youth-Led Climate Movement

A five-part series diving deep into an evaluation of the first four years setting up Green New Deal Rising.

Over the past four years, Green New Deal Rising has grown from an experiment in youth organising into a national movement that has deployed and scaled a range of tactics in the fight to win a Green New Deal in the UK.

Launched in the summer of 2021 as the youth organising arm of Green New Deal UK, we set ourselves three ambitious goals:

1. Make a Green New Deal an election-defining issue.

2. Re-align opposition parties around a transformative climate agenda.

3. Build majority public support for climate justice.

In pursuing those aims, we’ve tried things that worked, things that didn’t, and things that surprised even us. This series is a reflection on that journey: what we’ve learned, what we’d do differently, and what we think the climate justice movement needs to grapple with as the political terrain shifts. We want to say a big thank you to Sam Nadal and Cathy Rogers from the Social Change Lab who worked with us to craft this series.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll share five pieces, each focused on a core lesson from our first strategy (2021–2024), offered in the spirit of honest reflection and shared learning.

We are grateful to everyone who has supported us through our first roadmap. Organising is always a collective endeavour, shaped by many hands, many risks taken, and many acts of courage. These reflections are shared in that same spirit, for fellow builders and strategists committed to pushing forward the fight for climate and economic justice.

Lesson one: Organising is our superpower, if we truly invest in diverse leadership and culture

At GNDR, organising remains our most powerful tool. At a time when trust in politics is low and top-down strategies are faltering, organising gives us moral authority, real power to shift political conditions, and the legitimacy to speak hard truths. To sustain that power, we have made a deliberate choice to invest in organising that builds the leadership capacity of young people, particularly in publicly visible and decision-shaping roles.

Building diverse leadership. There is now broad agreement across the sector about the importance of diversity across race, class, gender, lived experience, and geography. Yet progress remains uneven and fragile. Too often, diversity is treated as an outcome to be measured rather than a shift in how power is built and exercised. Leadership pathways remain narrow and passive, shaped by unspoken norms around confidence, availability, and proximity to decision-making.

There is also a quieter problem that’s rarely named. Across our sector, we are often selective about who we consider politically relevant to organise, and that selectivity is shaped as much by bias and convenience as by principle. Too often, identities are instrumentalised rather than engaged in their full complexity. People are welcomed into movements because they symbolise something, mobilise a demographic, or strengthen a narrative, but not because their lived realities are allowed to reshape strategy, timelines, or demands. When that happens, diversity becomes extractive rather than transformative.

That analysis is what led us to design our Leadership Programme differently. Rather than waiting for young people on the margins to navigate our spaces, we resourced a recruitment strategy that went into communities and into people’s own environments, deliberately reaching those least likely to self-select into national climate spaces. We invested heavily in recruitment because who you reach determines who gets to lead.

We were equally intentional about the programme itself. It was designed not just to build skills, but to expose participants immediately to opportunities to exercise them. Leadership capacity means little without real moments to practise it. Participants were supported to step into visible roles, take responsibility, and test their leadership in live organising conditions.

We also recruited in local cohorts. Sustainable leadership is built in community, not in isolation. Developing alongside peers created clusters of support, challenge, and accountability that lasted well beyond the formal programme.

One of the most important lessons came later. In our early years, the Leadership Programme ran alongside our day-to-day organising. That limited absorption. When the wider movement was not in a place to take on new leadership, graduates often fell away. Over time, we learned to integrate the programme directly into our organising cycles. We timed recruitment and training to moments of growth and activity, and deliberately planned for an injection of new capacity by ensuring there were clear roles and moments for people to step in and step up.

Across the programme, we have now supported over 150 young people from underrepresented backgrounds, including working-class organisers, people of colour, and those with lived experience of disability and neurodivergence. Many have gone on to take up visible leadership across our campaigns, facilitate community-based actions, join the staff team, and expand our organising networks. This has not just diversified who is involved. It has strengthened our collective capacity to mobilise, sustain leadership, and win.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast. From the beginning, our organising principles have been the backbone of how we work. We invested heavily in front-loading, embedding a clear and replicable DNA through our movement story, plan to win, structure, and principles. That DNA has given organisers something to hold onto in moments of uncertainty or pressure. It has also created unity, ensuring that no matter where or how someone joins, they enter a shared organising container with common expectations and values.

What we have learned over the past four years is that culture does not sustain itself. It has to be actively nurtured as a movement grows. That means communicating it clearly to allies, building strong local teams who can hold and pass it on, and guarding against dilution. Practices like meeting in person, creating an organiser handbook, consistently reinforcing our principles at each action, and prioritising culture building as staff have proven essential to maintaining a healthy microculture.

As we have expanded and become more diverse, we have also learned that conflict is inevitable. The real test is whether tensions are named early and addressed directly, rather than ignored or suppressed.

We have also been honest with ourselves about a difficult truth. Our movement is not for everyone. Some people drift away or crash out as expectations and values become clearer over time. That is why front-loading our DNA matters. It allows people to decide early whether GNDR is the right organising home for them. At the same time, we stay vigilant against hardening into something exclusionary or rigid. Our culture is a living thing. It must be challenged and renewed to remain healthy, inclusive, and grounded in our organising principles.

Strong roots, flexible branches. Our organising has been shaped by an attempt to build structures with the capacity to last. Structures that can hold local and national organising at the same time, make space for both in-person and digital work, and respond to shifting political moments without constantly reinventing themselves. Just as importantly, these structures have been designed to create leadership opportunities that can scale alongside the movement, rather than bottlenecking power at the centre.

That durability rests on a strong theoretical foundation. Two influences have shaped our approach. Big Organising informed how we design for scale, distribute work to volunteers, and maintain a central plan. The Momentum model helped us combine mass protest with structure-based organising, grounding our power analysis and theory of change. We have also drawn inspiration from movements like the Sunrise Movement, the global school strikes, and Corbyn-era Labour organising, all of which showed what is possible when organising logic, leadership, and political momentum align.

At the same time, we are honest about what has been harder. Despite deep thinking about structure and theory, we have not always been able to generate the kind of breakthrough momentum those movements achieved. The political context we’ve operated in has been volatile, fragmented, and often hostile, making sustained mass mobilisation harder to ignite and harder to hold.

We’re also still learning how to be comfortable with the cyclical nature of movements. There are periods when structures feel full and generative, able to absorb new people and momentum quickly. There are others when those same structures can feel hollow, waiting for the next surge of energy. Movements are living things, they are not always meant to be large. Part of the work is learning to hold structures through quieter periods without mistaking them for failure, so they are ready when momentum returns.