Rhiannon Rasaretnam, 17, power-walked up 2nd Ave with her Sierra Club backpack, clutching prepared remarks for a speech she would give to the political group Indivisible. It was 11:30 AM, when most other high school students were in school, but she only had to attend one period for the day. Lucky. This was crunch time.
When Rasaretnam reached the federal building, she looked around breathlessly for her Seattle co-organizer, 17-year-old Emilia Allard.
“Where were you?!” Rasaretnam demanded when her friend arrived.
“There’s no parking in Seattle!” Allard said.
Rasaretnam and Allard met just one month ago, when they unknowingly created redundant Facebook pages in the wake of the Parkland school shooting attempting to organize student activists. Rasaretnam, a Tahoma High School student, then reached out to Allard, of Ballard High School, and they decided to work together.
They didn’t tell their parents at first. “At that point, we didn’t think it was going to be anything big,” Rasaretnam said. But within a day, the Facebook group hit a thousand RSVPs. Since then, the group has grown to 8,200, not to mention the addition of an estimated 450 volunteers and a $16,715 GoFundMe. Now the teens organize through a group calendar and various teams (social, logistics, voter registration, fundraising) on the messaging app GroupMe.
On Tuesday, a day the students agreed to let me shadow them, Rasaretnam said she was running on one hour of sleep. She had stayed up late on the March for Our Lives Facebook messenger chat with core student organizers. Both she and Allard are constantly working through their phones. “Sometimes I’ll leave my phone for just an hour to go to class and I come back, and there are like 30 emails,” Allard said.
