Rhiana Gunn-Wright
Rhiana Gunn-Wright is an architect of the Green New Deal, crafting new age policy.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright is a former director of climate policy at Roosevelt Institute and a member of the Evergreen Advisory Board.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright led the Roosevelt Institute’s research at the intersection of climate policy, public investment, racial equity, and public power. Her work aims to examine the role of economic policy and large-scale economic transformation in catalyzing just and rapid responses to the climate crisis.
Rhiana’s career in public policy began after graduating from Yale magna cum laude in 2011. In the summer of 2013, she served as a White House policy intern in First Lady Michelle Obama’s Office, and in 2015, she became a Design Research Fellow at Educational Credit Management Corporation in Minneapolis. Rhiana also worked as the Policy Analyst for the Detroit Health Department headed by Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, and then served as the Policy Director for El-Sayed’s 2018 Michigan gubernatorial campaign. After El-Sayed’s loss, she joined New Consensus, a D.C.-based think tank founded by Demond Drummer, a Chicago-based grassroots organizer, and Saikat Chakrabarti, former Chief of Staff to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
As the policy lead for New Consensus, Rhiana was one of the intellectual architects of the Green New Deal. In February 2019, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts formally introduced a non-binding congressional resolution which called for a ten-year Green New Deal plan to tackle climate change, create clean energy jobs while promoting social and environmental justice. In April 2021, Ocasio-Cortez and Markey reintroduced the resolution to the congress.
Rhiana’s senior thesis, “Breaking the Brood Mare: Representation, Welfare Policy and Teen Pregnancy in New Haven,” earned several awards at Yale, including the Steere Prize in Women’s Studies. In 2013, she received the Rhodes Scholarship from the University of Oxford, where she obtained an MPhil in Comparative Social Policy in 2015. In 2019, Rhiana Gunn-Wright was included in Time magazine’s list of the “15 Women Leading the Fight Against Climate Change.” Rhiana is the author of the critically acclaimed essay “The Green New Deal for All of Us,” and she has written pieces for the New York Times and Teen Vogue. She is currently working on a book about the climate crisis.
“Rhiana Gunn-Wright was a pleasure to work with. Our students shared that they felt she was very approachable to talk to, and had great expertise and experience to share. She was excellent at articulating her points and balanced being agreeable and challenging of the opposing viewpoint from the counterspeaker.”
—Hamilton College
Trinity Says
“Rhiana is brilliant with a sense of humor that belies her fierce passion for our environment. Not all solutions are inclusive but they can be, and she knows the way.”
Expertise
- A leading climate policy expert, illuminating how race and class factor into environmental policy and environmental justice
- Speaker on the Green New Deal and public investment into the future of climate, infrastructure, and labor, key in conversations about AI investment and energy consumption
- Offers a blueprint for the transition of fossil fuels to clean energy
Video Highlight
“The Green New Deal is essentially a proposal to tackle what we define as the twin crises of income inequity and climate change at once.”