One by one, students with family living on islands throughout the Pacific Ocean took the mic to tell their stories. Then Centennial High School senior Misha Loanis began to speak.

“Climate change is an urgency because I have a 15-year-old sister who will be distraught if she lost the only home she knew,” she told a group of a few hundred Portland-area students assembled in Shemanski Park Friday morning.

Loanis choked up as she tried to continue. And as she did, her fellow students, many of whom are also of Pacific Islander descent, surrounded her in a group hug.

The moment came early during the Portland rally, one of several such demonstrations taking place concurrently across the country timed to coincide with the United Nations’ annual climate change conference. The scene in Portland mirrored those in other cities Friday as scores of students took to the streets to push their local governments to adopt green energy policies.

Several of the gatherings were organized by the Sunrise Movement, a collective of climate activists who have achieved prominence over the last year in part for videos of its members confronting political candidates.

Portland’s iteration was organized by Pacific Islander and indigenous students from Roosevelt High School, along with the climate justice class at Lincoln High and members of the Pacific Climate Warriors.

Loanis was one of several students whose families hail from the Pacific islands at the fore of the Portland protest, which began at 10:30 a.m. across the street from Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall and culminated in a march through downtown.

“The sea is rising and so are we,” students chanted as they made their way down Southwest Salmon Street.

The throng stretched as many as three city blocks before reaching its destination: the amphitheater at Terry Schrunk Federal Plaza. Once there, student organizers handed a list of demands to Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler after a series of speeches.

The group wants the city council to declare a climate crisis and work with members of the indigenous and Pacific Islander communities, which students say are the first to feel the deleterious effects of such things as rising sea levels.

Students also want city officials to take direction from those communities and “listen to understand, rather than listen to respond” as one speaker said. And they want Wheeler and city councilors to recognize their organizing efforts, which include at least one more climate rally scheduled for Earth Day.

“You can hear there’s a strong sense of urgency that this generation has around climate action and I certainly embrace that urgency,” Wheeler told a cluster of reporters. “We’re prepared to take steps, very specific action steps, to acknowledge that urgency.”

Among those steps, Wheeler said, was passing a ban on the distribution of plastic straws, denying Zenith Energy’s request to construct pipes beneath its oil terminal along the Willamette River and continuing work on funding the TriMet YouthPass program.

Wheeler said he’ll detail more environmental policy proposals during an address to the Portland City Club next week.

Friday’s rally is the third time this year — and the second since school began in late August — that students across the country have walked out of class to push for their local governments to adopt greener climate policies.

A similar demonstration in September drew thousands to downtown Portland, shutting the Hawthorne Bridge to westbound traffic for a few hours. Roosevelt High senior Kaiya Laguardia-Yonamine was one of several Pacific Islander students on the frontlines of that protest, her family’s plight on the Okinawa Islands the inspiration for her activism.

On Friday, she recited a poem to the crowd gathered at Shemanski Park in Uchinaaguchi, the language spoken on Uchina, the native name for the group of islands.

“Our island is our treasure,” Laguardia-Yonamine said as students cheered.

Hours earlier, Lakeridge High School seniors Ella Feathers and Anna-Marie Guenther met with Lake Oswego city officials to deliver their own list of demands.

Like their peers in Portland, Feathers and Guenther want Lake Oswego City Council to declare a climate emergency and include community groups, particularly youth, in drafting climate policy.

“Younger voices are often drowned out by older people, so this is a step for us to face problems head-on that some of them refuse to acknowledge,” Guenther said.

Youth in Corvallis, Eugene and Beaverton led similar demonstrations, as did activists in Vancouver, Washington.

Dawn Swan, 40, travelled from Hillsboro to the Portland march, her daughter Deihja in tow. Swan said she wanted Deihja, who attends West Union Elementary School, to get a taste of activism during Friday’s demonstration.

“Everyone’s out here because we’re not taking care of our land. We’re not taking care of our animals. We’re not taking care of our plants,” Swan, who’s Native American, said. “I just wanted to come out here to support our kids.”