The first thing I noticed when I arrived at Manhattan’s Collect Pond Park, where I planned to meet the Sunrise Movement’s cofounder Varshini Prakash, is that there’s no pond. I could see where one once was: In the center of the park there’s a shallow concrete pit the size of a large swimming pool. Inside it, pigeons pecked at a couple of discarded bagels. A quick Google search told me the pond was originally sixty feet deep and naturally occurring, its water supplied by an underground spring.

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The idea had been to take portraits of Prakash in nature. The park’s trees, shrubs, and—I had hoped—water seemed like an appropriate backdrop for someone leading an organization at the forefront of the movement for climate justice. But the more time I spent with Prakash, the more obvious it became how incongruous our choice of an initial meeting spot had been.

As Sunrise’s executive director, 26-year-old Prakash was facing a day packed with media interviews, and in the afternoon, she was to give the final speech at a rally in Foley Square and dispatch tens of thousands of protesters on a march to Battery Park. When she arrived at Collect Pond Park at around 8:40 a.m. she was still working on the draft of that speech. But she was buoyant and unworried. “Have y’all seen the numbers in Australia?” she called out to me and the photographer as she approached us, her dark curls still wet. “There’s already half a million people striking!”

It was the morning of the September climate strikes, the global protests inspired by the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg’s FridaysForFuture. More than 5,000 strikes were expected to take place in 156 countries by the end of the week, turning out millions of people calling for action on climate change. That the Sunrise Movement would have a presence at the strikes was a given: In the past year, the youth-led group has burst into the spotlight, gaining national attention for confronting high-profile members of Congress and for propelling the Green New Deal—historic legislation tackling climate change and economic inequality—to the center of mainstream political discourse.

Prakash is certainly worried about the impact of climate change on the environment, but what keeps her up at night—quite literally at times—is thinking about its impact on people. She’s worried about water wars, food scarcity, and the climate disasters that have already displaced roughly 21.5 million people . She hated Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth when she saw it as a 14-year-old, precisely because it seemed to leave people out. (And also, as she would later tell me with a laugh, because she thought it was a bad movie.)

Prakash first became conscious of the climate crisis when she was 11 years old. She remembers watching CNN broadcast footage of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which resulted in the deaths of nearly 230,000 people, some of whom lived in South India, where her parents are from. Thousands of miles away, in her hometown just outside Boston, Prakash offered what help she could. She donated canned goods to the Red Cross, but the gesture seemed woefully small in comparison with the magnitude of the problem.

The group’s pivotal moment came in November 2018, when the newly elected New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined more than 150 Sunrise protesters occupying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office to demand that she establish a congressional task force dedicated to climate change. In the weeks that followed, Prakash, who had been handling communications for Sunrise up until that point, became the organization’s executive director.

Prakash launched the Sunrise Movement in 2017 with seven other co-founders, whom she met through the climate organizing she did as a college student in Amherst, Massachusetts. At the time, the eight of them made up the entirety of Sunrise’s membership. They worked remotely for basically no pay, and since many of them had just graduated, some still lived with their parents. But the organizing they did at the time didn’t look much different from what the group is now well-known for: They trained youth organizers, bird-dogged politicians, and mobilized Sunrise’s growing ranks for protests and rallies—just on a “far smaller level,” Prakash said.

In my time with Prakash, she always had time for another conversation, another photo, another interview, and never showed any signs of flagging energy. She had the self-assurance and charisma of a veteran politician, but talking to her felt like talking to a friend—a good one, who doesn’t bullshit.

Within minutes of approaching the media tent at Foley Square, Prakash was bombarded by the press; by noon she’d given at least half a dozen interviews. Before answering questions on camera for MTV News, Prakash complimented the reporter’s knitted sweater, which had a sun rising over a body of water on the front. “I was thinking of you when I put it on,” the reporter told her. They took a selfie together, then Prakash returned to a nearby huddle of Sunrise staff—composed of Precht-Rodriguez, Alex O’Keefe, who does video work for the group, and Sofie Karasek, Sunrise’s deputy communications director—and shot a video for the group’s Instagram in one take.

A systematic response to climate change could save “literally millions of people on this planet. And every single decimal point of warming you can avoid, you do save millions of people’s lives on this planet.”

After breakfast we walked to the rally, Prakash typing out the rest of her speech on her phone. At a crosswalk, Zina Precht-Rodriguez, a 22-year-old Sunrise media fellow who was accompanying Prakash for the day, held out her arms to keep Prakash from stepping into oncoming traffic. “I’m here to protect you today,” Precht-Rodriguez reassured her.

But when I asked how she dealt with all these new pressures, Prakash barely hesitated. After two beats, she casually replied, “I think I handled it pretty well.”

“All of a sudden I was a public figure,” she told me over breakfast at a Tribeca diner near Foley Square. “All of a sudden there was so much scrutiny on everything we did, and so everything I do, I’m like, Yeah, this could go a bad way,” she continued. “Everything I did felt like so much more high-stakes.”

“The funny thing about her coming from communications is that in some ways she was amazing at it: She’s super smart and organized and on top of everything,” Sara Blazevic, another one of Sunrise’s co-founders, told me on the phone a few days later. “In other ways, she wasn’t the best at it. So much of comms work is figuring out how to spin something. Varshini does not like to spin things.”

Back at Foley Square, Prakash smiled as she climbed up onto the stage. But once she began delivering her speech, she turned deadly serious, speaking in a booming voice that sounded as though she had tapped into an extra reserve of power she’d been saving for this moment.

“Striking is how we can stop the worst of climate change and win a Green New Deal,” Prakash shouted, her voice trembling slightly. “But I gotta be honest with you—we gotta be honest with each other if we want to win. We gotta be honest with each other if we want to survive. There are not enough of us here yet. There are four million people out in the streets today, but there are not enough of us yet.”

Growing up, Prakash wanted to be a doctor because she thought it was the best way she could help people. But when she arrived at UMass Amherst she “tripped and fell into social movements.” During her sophomore year, a woman named Katie MacDonald, a divestment organizer whose job was to recruit college students to the national divestment movement, asked her to speak at a rally on campus. Prakash had never spoken in front of a large group of people before, but she accepted, addressing a crowd of about 100 during finals week.