We drew hundred out for a protest on one of the coldest days of the year to stand up to ICE and their kidnapping of our neighbors. We didn’t stop there, since then we’ve worked with other organizations to pressure the County and City Council to pass anti-ICE cooperation legislation and we’ve done Wide Awakes against ICE Agents sleeping in Pittsburgh hotels, and have protested at the Monshannon Valley Detention Center, the largest Detention Center in the Northeast.

To fund the Allegheny County Health Department’s monitoring of pollution it sells permits which are required by polluters to pollute. Yet, the cost of the permits hasn’t been enough to actually monitor pollution. With the chief air pollution scientist previously being paid not much more than minimum wage. We and a coalition of other organizations including the Breathe Project, Pennsylvania Interfaith Impact Network and others lobbied members of county council and got County Council to pass this legislation UNANIMOUSLY to raise permit fees to make sure environmental laws are actually enforced. 

Fetterman ran as a supposed progressive, but since then he has utterly failed us. He has voted to continue to used taxpayer dollars to enable billionaires to get even more rich in orer to kill children overseas rather than helping children at home. He has voted to protect ICE even as his wife is an immigrant and he has said he opposes ICE, yet his voting records say otherwise. So we took action, protesting at Fetterman’s office in downtown Pittsburgh. 

We pushed for legislation requiring the County to create a Countywide Climate Action Plan, after months of work by us and our allies it passed UNANIMOUSLY. 

We worked with hubs across Pennsylvania, coalitions like the Make the Road Coalition, and even building trade groups to push for Pennsylvania to enact Whole Homes Repairs which would give Pennsylvanian homeowners up to $15,000 repair their homes from mold, climate disasters, secure insulation, and protect vulnerable populations. This bill PASSED the Pennsylvania State Legislature, and lead to conversations at the federal about enacting similar legislation. Unfortunately, every year since the Republican caucus has voted the budget for it down everytime they don’t get everything they want.

With the terrible term of Rich Fritzgerald, who thinks fracking should happen in public parks, kept the Health department from doing its job of protecting residents from air pollution, and pushed for fossil fuels in Southwestern PA. On labor issues, he vetoed minimum wage for county employees preventing a minimum wage of even $20 per hour, and paid sick leave for all workers living in the county. 

We backed Sara Innamorato for County Executive, a progressive fighter in the state legislature. We canvassed for her weekend after weekend, and were out on election day poll watching to make sure she won the election, both the primary and the general election.

Can you believe it? In Allegheny County it was legal to frack in county parks. That is until we pushed legislation to stop it, over the County Executive, Rich Fritzgerald’s veto. We protested and lobbied for months pushing for common sense legislation to protect our green spaces, reduce air pollution, protect our water supplies and prevent climate chaos. 

We’re involved in electing Summer Lee, a true champion of the working class and the climate to office. We knocked on over a thousand doors in both each primary and general elections, both in 2022 to push Summer Lee across the finish line. She won by just 988 votes, meaning we made a tangible difference in the outcome of the election. After Summer Lee’s victory in the nailbiting 2022 primary we knocked on tens of thousands of doors again to bring out the vote for Summer Lee. Which we did again, despite the republican party’s efforts to confuse voters with a republican candidate with the same name as the retiring congressman. We regularly do canvassing for other candidates and put a voter guide twice a year for the primary and election elections. 

We and other Sunrise hubs across the country came to Washington, DC to protest in front of the White House to pressure President Biden to take action on the climate crisis and pass robust climate legislation. Some of our members literally hiked from Harrisburg to DC for this action. We were successful in moving public perception of solving the climate crisis to be something that will create millions of jobs.