You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty

One of the nation’s leading anti-poverty organizers and moral voices shares the largely untold story of the movement to end poverty, open to all, and led by the poor themselves

As one of the nation’s leading anti-poverty organizers and moral voices, Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis explores the largely untold history of poor people’s movements in the United States and traces her own journey through some of the most significant anti-poverty struggles of the past thirty years.

In this book, Theoharis introduces us to the people leading the movement to end poverty, including:

• multiracial groups of homeless people rising up from the streets and seizing empty, federally-owned homes;
• mothers on welfare shutting down entire city blocks and going toe-to-toe with some of the most powerful people in the country;
• farmworkers busting modern-day slave rings and winning living wages from multinational fast-food companies; and
• coal miners, veterans, unemployed workers, students, artists, and more joining together in unusual and creative alliances to fight, sing, and pray their way toward freedom.

Drawing from personal experience, history, religion, political strategy, and more, Theoharis argues that American poverty will not end because of the goodwill of the powerful or through the charitable actions of well-meaning people alone. It will happen through a mass movement to end poverty, open to all, and led by the poor.

Theoharis passionately reminds us that poor people are not condemned to be subjects of history, but have always been agents of transformative change, and can be once again. Indeed, to reorient our society around the needs of everyone and reinvigorate the promise of democracy, the poor can and must become the architects of a new America.

The Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis is founder and codirector of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice and coordinator of the Poverty Initiative at Union Theological Seminary. An ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church, Theoharis is a popular speaker, teacher, and activist, and has published numerous books and articles including Always With Us?: What Jesus Really Said About the Poor.

Noam Sandweiss-Back is the Director of Partnerships for the Kairos Center and the Poor People’s Campaign. His political work has taken him from Jerusalem to Louisiana and he now works with organizations across the country to build the movement to end poverty.