You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take

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Events

You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take

The Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis and Noam Sandweiss-Back in conversation with Aaron Scott & Ciara Taylor

Online

Conversation

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 You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty (Beacon Press, 2025), Theoharis and co-author Noam Sandweiss-Back give credit 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 and Sandweiss-Back argue 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.

The book is a passionate reminder 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.

ATTEND

Accessibility

This event is free, open to the public, and will stream online on BCRW’s YouTube page. ASL interpretation and live transcription will be provided.

Registration is preferred.

Speakers

The Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis is the Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival with the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II. She is the Director of the Kairos Center and a Founder and the Coordinator of the Poverty Initiative. She has spent the past two decades organizing amongst the poor in the United States, working with and advising grassroots organizations with significant victories including the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the Vermont Workers Center, Domestic Workers United, the United Workers Association, the National Union of the Homeless and the Kensington Welfare Rights Union. She has led hundreds of trainings, Bible studies, and leadership development workshops; spoken at dozens of conferences and keynote presentations across the US and globally; and published several articles and book chapters sharing her vision that poverty can be ended and that the poor can be agents of social change. Liz received her BA in Urban Studies from the University of Pennsylvania; her M.Div. from Union Theological Seminary in 2004 where she was the first William Sloane Coffin Scholar; and her PhD from Union in New Testament and Christian Origins. She is the author of Always with Us?: What Jesus Really Said about the Poor (Eerdmans, 2017) and co-author, with Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II and Rev. Dr. Rick Lowery of Revive Us Again: Vision and Action in Moral Organizing (Beacon Press, 2018). Liz is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA).

Noam Sandweiss-Back is the Director of Partnerships for the Kairos Center. His political work has taken him from Jerusalem to Louisiana and he now works with leaders across the country to support movements for social, racial, and economic justice. His forthcoming book, You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty (Beacon Press), is co-written with Rev. Liz Theoharis and set for release on April 8, 2025. Noam sits on the board of ESCR-Net (International Network for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights).

Aaron Scott serves as The Episcopal Church’s first Gender Justice Staff Officer supporting LGBTQ+ and women’s justice initiatives churchwide. Prior to this role, he served as coordinator for the Kairos Center’s Countering White Christian Nationalism initiative. Aaron was also the cofounder of Chaplains on the Harbor, developing a base of 500+ poor, unhoused, and incarcerated leaders in rural Grays Harbor County, Washington through projects of survival and political education. His first book, Bring Back Your People: Ten Ways Regular Folks Can Put a Dent in White Christian Nationalism, was published by Broadleaf Books early this year. A second generation preacher and a third generation organizer, Aaron graduated from Union Theological Seminary with a concentration in Biblical Studies (M.A., 2009). He lives in Tacoma, Washington.

Ciara Taylor is the Cultural Strategies Organizer and Educator for the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, working across the program areas of Culture and Communications and Poverty Scholarship and Leadership Development — to help produce cultural resources, develop curriculum, and build network relationships that will shift the narrative about racism, poverty, and ecological devastation, militarism, and Christian nationalism and build power among poor and low-income people across the country and world. Ciara is also an educator and organizer with the University of the Poor, the National Welfare Rights Union, the National Union of the Homeless, and the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, and the co-founder of the Dream Defenders, a Florida-based youth-led organization that emerged after the killing of 17 year-old Trayvon Martin, where she served as the Political Director and later as the Director of Political Consciousness. She is also an artist with Subversive Activities.