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

by Liz Theoharis, Noam Sandweiss-Back

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:

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;

andcoal 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.

Genres: Politics, History, Sociology, Nonfiction

272 pages, Hardcover

Published April 8, 2025

About the author

The Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis is Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival with the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II that organized the largest coordinated wave of nonviolent civil disobedience in 21st Century America and has since emerged as one of the nation’s leading social movement forces. She is the Director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary.

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 has been published in The New York Times, Time Magazine, CNN, The Guardian, Sojourners, The Nation, and others. In 2018, she gave the “Building a Moral Movement” TEDtalk at TEDWomen, was named one of the Politico 50 “thinkers, doers and visionaries whose ideas are driving politics”, and was also named a Women of Faith recipient by the Presbyterian Church (USA). In 2019, she was a Selma “Bridge” Award recipient and named one of 11 Women Shaping the Church by Sojourners. In 2020 she was named one of 15 Faith Leaders to Watch by the Center for American Progress.

Reviews

[Michael Hitchcock · Rating 4 out of 5]

I struggled with this book in two different ways, neither of which I think would apply to readers who are new to the movement.

The whole of this book promoted a style of mass organization and recruiting leadership from amongst those who are most personally affected by the issues and it promoted it through a ton of different real life examples including victories, defeats, and complicated actions that might not have achieved their goal, but still pushed the movement forward.

I think for an average reader this book could be really engaging and important and motivating and inspiring.

I sometimes found it to be a bit of a slog especially the parts where the authors were just saying how they think things should be done. Either I already know that and agree with them or I disagree with them, but have heard it before. The book for me really lit up in the last two chapters, the one about the struggle for the meaning and impact of their Christian faith, and the one defining a kairos moment. I am God‘s most powerful Agnostic, I most likely will never be a Christian, but I sure love when Christians get deep into it. As a communist organizer, some of my greatest allies are Christian organizers (including my wife and greatest ally).

I also had a very complicated relationship with a big part of this book that I can’t tell if it comes from the book and authors and their movement experience or if it’s coming from my own personal baggage. But to me, they almost fetishized the involvement of non-white people. As somebody who grew up in total poverty and watched individual Black leaders from my own neighborhood get uplifted to positions of prominence and affluence that never trickled down to my neighborhood, I don’t automatically see Black leadership as liberatory. The Black police chief of our city helped cover up the police murder of a young Latino man in our city.

But! In such a racist society where the voices of women and brown people are so regularly sidelined and ignored, this might just be a natural pendulum swing to help a general audience see the leadership potential in people that I already know the leadership potential of because I already organize on an explicitly multiracial multi gender working class led platform myself. I might just be really sensitive to this issue because of the way the authenticity of lived experience from racial identity has been used to co-opt and water down our radical abolitionist demands we have organized around before.

Ultimately, I’d be very happy to recommend this book and share it around and I think it could help people understand the leadership potential of a lot of people around us suffering from stupid oppressive policies. In honesty, this book may be less urgent for people who are already just in that work. But if you’re new to the work or feeling lonely in the work, I think it would feel beautiful to connect with other people, strangers, fighting with the same intensity you are on some other battlegrounds in the same war

[Polly Callahan]

cited here https://www.theguardian.com/commentis...

[Savannah Gray · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are at all involved/interested in community organizing, read this book!

“We need bottom-up moral movements, led by people who are not waiting to be ‘saved’ but who are taking lifesaving action where violence and death proliferate” (pg 190).

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. You only get what you're organized to take” (pg 214).

[Peter Z. · Rating 1 out of 5]

So, a revolution of the proletariat?

[Michelle Pulignani · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellent book.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great call to a prophetic imagination of a world without poverty. Theoharis lays out the facts clearly and intersperses it with her own story helpfully.