Lunch and Learn: The Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis on "You Only Get What You're Organized to Take"

This winter, grab your favorite lunch at noon and tune in to virtual conversations with the Prince George’s County Office of Human Rights and the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System on topics from repairing the effects of racial injustice to fighting for equitable access to recovering from exile and loss. Let’s learn together!

Lunch and Learn returns with special guest The Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis in conversation with the Prince George's County Office of Human Rights and the Prince George's County Memorial Library System discussing her new book, "You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty."

Registration not required. Click on the YouTube video linked below to stream the program live or watch the recording later. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQN_GNb8biE

About the Book:

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 30 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.

About the author: 

The Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis is Director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary and Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. She is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and teaches at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

Rev. Dr. Theoharis is the co-author of You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty (Beacon, 2025), co-editor of We Pray Freedom: Liturgies and Rituals from the Freedom Church of the Poor (Broadleaf Press, 2025), editor of We Cry Justice: Reading the Bible with the Poor People’s Campaign (Broadleaf Press, 2021), author of Always with Us?: What Jesus Really Said about the Poor (Eerdmans, 2017) and co-author of Revive Us Again: Vision and Action in Moral Organizing (Beacon, 2018). She has been published in The New York Times, Washington Post, Time Magazine, Newsweek, Politico, The Hill, The Guardian, The Nation, Boston Review, CNN, Religion News Service, Sojourners, Religion Dispatches, the Grio, La Jornada, Salon, Slate, and elsewhere.

Rev. Dr. Theoharis has been organizing among poor and low-income communities for thirty years with organizations such as the National Union of the Homeless, the National Welfare Rights Union, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Domestic Workers United and many more. Raised in a family committed to social justice, civil liberties and human rights, she has been
involved in the movement for her whole life.

Rev. Dr. Theoharis was awarded the Children's HealthWatch Champion Award in 2022, the 30th Annual Freedom Award by the National Civil Rights Museum, the Hunger Leadership Award from the Congressional Hunger Center, and Villanova Peace Award in 2021, each along with the Rev. Dr. William Barber II for their work with the Poor People’s Campaign. In 2020 she was named one of 15 Faith Leaders to Watch by the Center for American Progress. In 2019, she was a Selma “Bridge” Award recipient and named one of 11 Women Shaping the Church by Sojourners. 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 Award recipient by the Presbyterian Church (USA). Rev. Dr. Theoharis 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.

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