New book co-written by PC(USA) pastor the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis sparks a lively discussion
Theoharis and co-author Noam Sandweiss-Back appear with Kairos Center colleagues during an engaging webinar
LOUISVILLE — Together with two colleagues at the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights & Social Justice, the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, a PC(USA) pastor and the co-founder of the Poor People’s Campaign, and Noam Sandweiss-Back, the authors of “You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty,” were the guests last week on a webinar hosted by the Barnard Center for Research on Women. Listen to their lively 86-minute conversation with host Dr. Beck Jordan-Young, the Barnard Center’s interim director, here.
Joining the webinar were Aaron Scott and Ciara Taylor, staff members of the Kairos Center. Taylor spoke and sang twice during the broadcast.
Sandweiss-Back talked about a large contingent of Poor People’s Campaign folks who attended recent House budget hearings on the budget bill adopted by a one-vote margin last week by House members. “It became clear to us as we build strong grassroots movements of the poor that there’s a real battle over the moral values in our society,” Sandweiss-Back said. “There’s a real battle for the Bible that has to happen. Not all of us are equipped to make that fight, and not all of us should, but it’s a critical piece of the puzzle.”
“They say poverty isn’t really a problem” or that “poor people aren’t working,” Theoharis said. “Many people in political power in this moment actually describe the poor as parasites, scary and violent and horrible stereotypes on steroids. … It’s a mess, but where we look in this moment is to movements for justice from the margins of society, who have always made a way out of no way and who have some real lessons for this moment.”
Theoharis got her start in social justice work while in college. It was among her job duties to help move unhoused families out of encampments into places including abandoned churches. It was there she saw “the specific role young people and students can play in movements for justice,” she said. “When the shelters were full and moms and babies were told to sleep in their cars under bridges, students and unhoused families were able to come together and say, ‘It doesn’t have to be this way.’”
“We could see the connections between militant and bold actions of poor and unhoused people and the organizing on campuses of college students,” Theoharis said. “We could see our survival and our thriving were inextricably connected.”
As Taylor pointed out, the title of the book comes from the National Union of the Homeless, which notes that “poverty in this country will not end because of the goodwill of those who hold power and wealth, or through the charitable actions of well-meaning and sympathetic people alone. A change of such scale requires a protagonist with a more pressing and compelling agenda.”
Taylor then sang a traditional Cameroonian folk song that called women to the village square. “We’ve been using this song,” Taylor said, “to call people into liberation.”
Jordan-Young asked Scott why defending the rights of LGBTQ people is “essential to a poor people’s movement?”
“Queer and trans people are poor people, in large part,” Scott replied. Trans people are employed at half the rate of the general population, and they serve in the military at about twice the rate “because we are poor,” Scott said.
“If we really want to win, we have to abolish poverty for everybody,” Scott said. “It’s really the only way you’re going to keep LGBTQ folks from being on the street, hungry and losing their health care access.”
“For me, the fundamental organizing strategy for doing that is, we as LGBTQ people have to be deeply embedded in poor people’s movements everywhere,” Scott said, displaying photos of some of the work being done in rural Grays Harbor County in Washington state.
Jordan-Young asked Theoharis whether student mobilization translates into the movement against poverty.
“As a 49-year-old woman now, the message we should be speaking in the highways and byways is, the kids are alright,” Theoharis said with a smile. “Students are leading the way and are at the forefront of all the most transformative change.”
As she travels, Theoharis has seen that it’s young people — “some college students, some not in college” — who are “doing bold and beautiful organizing and making the connections.”
“It’s no accident that in the Gaza solidarity encampments last year, so many low-income students and students of color were also making the connections and asking all of us to make the connections between war and climate and systemic racism and the impoverishment of more and more people. I am seeing powerful organizing,” she said. “We have a hopeful present and future, but it’s not easy. We have to hold up those young people and appreciate the work that’s being done.”
Not only are poor people leading the poor people’s campaign, they are “potential leaders for the entirety of our society,” Sandweiss-Back said. “Poor folks have the least to lose and the most to gain from a big change.”
“We need powerful, broad movements. It’s so clear in this moment of rising fascism,” he said. “What’s the social force that can animate that social movement? From our assessment, it’s those whose backs are up against the wall and who have no choice but to push.”
Jordan-Young asked Theoharis if there are organizing strategies “that are specifically feminist and effective.”
That question made Theoharis think of the work of Johnnie Tillmon, who chaired the National Welfare Rights Organization during the 1960s. Tillmon had “a model of organizing that I believe is a feminist model of organizing,” Theoharis said, with three components:
- The organization is led by those who are the most deeply impacted. “Those in pain know when their pain is relieved,” Theoharis said.
- Organizing has to be financially and politically independent.
- The importance of meeting the spiritual and material needs of the people. “There’s not a more feminist idea than this,” Theoharis said.
Students attending the webinar asked how they can be the most helpful.
“People are feeling poverty,” especially in recent months, Taylor said. “It’s a question of how do we link up our struggles and realize those in power never oppress evenly.”
“Keep doing what you’re doing,” Sandweiss-Back suggested. With Gaza being “one of the most significant poor people’s struggles right now,” students “understand that. The international solidarity and extra bravery students have demonstrated over the past year is deeply connected to the movement to end poverty.”
Scott added this: “I find as an organizer my analysis is sharpened by being in a movement with folks who see what we are up against from some of the most oppressive angles.”
At Jordan-Young’s request, Taylor brought the event to a close with a version of Ana Hernández’s “Set It Right,” which was in turn taken from an 1851 speech by Sojourner Truth.
A list of upcoming events around “You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take” can be found here.
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