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YOU ONLY GET WHAT YOU’RE ORGANIZED TO TAKE  
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Liz Theoharis and Noam Sandweiss-Back
April 15, 2025
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_ The Power of the Poor in Trump’s America _

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The day after Donald Trump won the 2024 election, the 10 richest
people in the world — including nine Americans — expanded their
wealth by nearly $64 billion, the greatest single-day increase
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recorded history. Since then, an unholy marriage of billionaire
investors, tech bros, Christian nationalists, and, of course, Donald
Trump has staged an oligarchic assault
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our democracy. If the nation’s corporate elite once leveraged their
relationships within government to enrich themselves, they’ve now
cut out the middleman. We’re living in a new Gilded Age, with a
proto-fascistic and religiously regressive administration of, by, and
for the billionaires.

With the wind at their backs, leading elements in the Republican Party
have rapidly eschewed euphemisms and political correctness altogether,
airing their anti-immigrant, anti-Black, and anti-poor prejudices in
unapologetically broad and brazen terms. The effect of this,
especially for the most vulnerable among us, is seismic. During the
first two months of the second Trump administration, we’ve witnessed
nothing less than an escalatory war on the poor.

The attacks are many-pronged. Rural development grants, food banks,
and environmental protection measures have all been slashed in the
name of “ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs
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Parenthood
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other life-saving healthcare services for poor and marginalized
communities have been defunded. Homelessness has been ever
more intensely criminalized
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Housing First policies vilified. The Department of Education
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which has historically provided critical resources for low-income and
disabled students, has been gutted, while the barbaric conditions
in overcrowded
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detention centers have only worsened. Billions of dollars in funding
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mental health and addiction services have been revoked. Worse yet,
these and other mercenary actions may prove to be just the tip of the
spear. Tariff wars and potential cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, Social
Security, and SNAP could leave both the lives of the poor and the
global economy in shambles.

This volatile moment may represent an unprecedented, even existential,
threat to the health of our democracy, but it is building on decades
of neoliberal plunder and economic austerity, authored by both
conservative and liberal politicians. Before the 2024 elections, there
were more than 140 million people living in poverty or one crisis away
— one job loss, eviction, medical issue, or debt collection — from
economic ruin. In this rich land, 45 million people regularly
experience [[link removed]] hunger
and food insecurity, while more than 80 million people are uninsured
or underinsured
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ten million people live
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housing or experience chronic housing insecurity, and the American
education system has regularly scored below average
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to those of other nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development.

Amid tremendous social and economic dislocation, traditional American
institutions and political alignments have steadily lost their meaning
for tens of millions of people. The majority of us know things
aren’t well in this country. We can feel it, thanks not just to the
violent and vitriolic political environment in which we live, but to
our bank statements and debt sheets, our rising rent and utility
bills. As the hull of our democracy splinters and floods, the question
remains: How do we chart a more just and humane path forward? There
are no easy answers, but there are profound lessons to be learned from
the past, especially from movements of poor and dispossessed people
that have inspired many of this country’s most important moments of
democratic awakening.

This is the focus of our new book, _You Only Get What You’re
Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty_
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Drawing on Liz’s 30 years of anti-poverty organizing, we poured over
old pamphlets and documents, memories and mementos to gather evidence
that social transformation at the hands of the poor remains an
ever-present possibility and to summarize some of the most significant
ideas that, even today, continue to animate their organized struggles.

HOMELESS, NOT HELPLESS

In the late spring of 1990, hundreds of unhoused people across the
country broke locks and chains off dozens of empty federally owned
houses and moved in. Bedrooms and kitchens carpeted with layers of
dust suddenly whirled with activity. Mattresses were carried in and
bags of food unpacked. Within hours, the new occupants made calls to
the city’s energy companies, requesting that the utilities be turned
on. They were remarkably disciplined and efficient — single moms who
had been living in their cars, veterans, students, and low-wage or
recently laid-off workers, and people battling illness without
healthcare. They were Black, Latino, Asian, Indigenous, and White, and
although they came from radically different slices of society, one
simple fact bound them together: they were poor, in need of housing,
and fed up.

That wave of takeovers was led by the National Union of the Homeless
(NUH)
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one among many carried out by the group in those years. The NUH was
not a charity, a service provider, or a professional advocacy group
but a political organization led by and for unhoused people, with
close to 30,000 members in 25 cities. Liz was introduced to it on her
first day of college. Within a few months, she had joined the movement
and never left.

NUH members included people who had recently lost their manufacturing
jobs and could no longer find steady work, as well as low-wage workers
who couldn’t keep up with the growing costs of housing and other
daily necessities. In such dire times, the reality of the unhoused
only foreshadowed the possible dislocation of millions more. The NUH
emphasized this truth in one of its slogans: “You Are Only One
Paycheck Away from Homelessness!” The name of the organization
itself reflected a connection between homelessness and the new economy
then being shaped. As industrial work floundered and labor unions
suffered, there was a growing need for new unions of poor and
dispossessed people.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the NUH won a string of victories,
including new policies guaranteeing 24-hour shelter intake, access to
public showers, and the right of the unhoused to vote without a
permanent address. They also won publicly funded housing programs run
by the formerly unhoused in nearly a dozen cities. Such successes were
a barometer of the incipient strength of the organized poor and a
corrective to the belief that poor people could perhaps spark
spontaneous outrage but never be a force capable of wielding effective
political power.

At the heart of the NUH were three principles: first, poor people can
be agents of change, not simply victims of a cruel history; second,
the power of the poor depends on their ability to unite across their
differences; and third, it is indeed possible to abolish poverty.
Those guiding principles were crystallized in two more slogans:
“Homeless, Not Helpless” and “No Housing, No Peace.” The first
captured a too-often obscured truth about the poor: that one’s
living conditions don’t define who we are or limit our capacity to
change our lives and the world around us. The second caught the
political and moral agency of the impoverished — that there will be
no peace and quiet until the demand for essential human needs is met.

Another NUH slogan has also echoed through the years: “You Only Get
What You’re Organized to Take.” It’s a favorite of ours because
it expresses a crucial argument of our book: that poverty and economic
inequality won’t end because of the goodwill of those who hold
political power and wealth (as is abundantly clear today) or even
through the charitable actions of sympathetic people.

Change on such a scale requires a protagonist with a more pressing
agenda. Poverty will end when poor people and their allies refuse to
allow society to remain complacent about the suffering and death
caused by economic deprivation. It will end when the poor become an
organized force capable of rallying a critical mass of society to
reorder the political and economic priorities of our country.

PROJECTS OF SURVIVAL

In the mid-1990s, Liz was active in North Philadelphia’s Kensington
Welfare Rights Organization (KWRU). Kensington’s workforce had by
then been decimated by deindustrialization and disinvestment. People
without steady or reliable housing were moving into vacant buildings
or cobbling together outdoor shelters, while tenants refused to leave
homes from which they were being evicted. In its actions, KWRU reached
deep into this well of experience, taking the spontaneous survival
strategies that poor people were already using and adapting them into
“projects of survival.”

The phrase “project of survival” was borrowed from the Black
Panther Party, which, in the 1960s and 1970s, created successful
“survival programs” like the Free Medical Clinic Program and the
Free Breakfast Program. In 1969, the head of the national School
Breakfast Program admitted that the Black Panthers were feeding more
poor children
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the state of California. The Panthers, however, were concerned with
more than just meeting immediate needs. They were focused on
structural transformation and, through their survival programs, they
highlighted the government’s refusal to deal seriously with American
poverty, even while then spending billions of dollars fighting distant
wars on the poor of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

KWRU learned from the Black Panthers. In the late fall of 1995, a cold
front swept through a large KWRU encampment known as Tent City. In
need of indoor shelter, the group set its sights on a vacant church a
few blocks away. Earlier that year, the archdiocese of Philadelphia
had shuttered St. Edward’s Catholic Church because its congregants
were poor and the drafty building expensive to maintain. Still, some
of those congregants continued to pray every Sunday in a small park
outside the shuttered church. Eventually, dozens of residents from
Tent City walked up the church steps, broke the locks on its front
doors, and ignited a highly publicized occupation that lasted through
that winter.

On the walls of the church, Liz and her compatriots hung posters and
banners, including one that asked, “Why do we worship a homeless man
on Sunday and ignore one on Monday?” As winter engulfed the city,
residents of St. Ed’s fed and cared for one another in a fugitive
congregation whose youngest resident was less than a year old and
whose oldest was in his nineties. That occupation ultimately pressured
the archdiocese to refocus its ministry on poor communities, while
electrifying the local media to report on the rampant poverty that had
normally been swept under the rug.

Such projects of survival enabled KWRU to build trust in Kensington,
while serving as bases for bigger and bolder organizing. As a young
woman, Liz gained new insight into how bottom-up change often begins.
While media narratives regularly depict poor people as lazy,
dangerous, or too over-burdened with their own problems to think about
others, there is an immense spirit of cooperation and generosity among
the poorest people in our society. Indeed, that spirit of communal
care is the generative ground from which powerful social movements
emerge.

A SURVIVAL REVIVAL FOR THESE TIMES

Today, amid the rising tide of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s
billionaire-fueled authoritarianism, there’s an urgent need for
defiant and militant organizing among a broad cross-section of
society. As our democratic horizons continue to narrow, we find
ourselves operating within a critical window of time. In our work, we
call this a “kairos moment.” In the days of antiquity, the Greeks
taught that there were two ways to understand
time: _chronos_ and _kairos_. _Chronos_ is quantitative time,
while _kairos_ is the qualitative time during which old and often
oppressive ways are dying while new understandings struggle to be
born.

In _kairos_ moments such as this sinister Trumpian one, it is often
the people whose backs are up against the wall who are willing to take
decisive action. In every popular, pro-democracy movement, there is a
leading social force that, by virtue of its place in the economic
pecking order, is compelled to act first, because for them it’s a
matter of life-or-death. And by moving into action, that force can
awaken the indignation and imagination of others.

Right now, there are tens of thousands of Americans already in motion
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communities from the growing ravages of economic, environmental, and
political disaster. Their efforts include food banks and neighborhood
associations; churches and other houses of worship providing sanctuary
for the unhoused and immigrants; women, trans kids, and other LGBTQ+
people [[link removed]] fighting to ensure that
they and their loved ones get the healthcare they need; community
schools stepping into the breach of our beleaguered public education
system [[link removed]]; mutual-aid groups responding to
environmental disasters that are only increasing thanks to the climate
crisis; and students protesting the genocide in Gaza and the
militarization of our society. Such communities of care and resistance
may still be small and scrappy, but within them lies a latent power
that, if further politicized and organized, could ignite a new era of
transformational movement-building at a time when our country is in
increasing danger.

Indeed, just imagine what might be possible if so many communities
were operating not in isolation but in coordination. Imagine the power
of such a potentially vast network to shake things up and assert the
moral, intellectual, and political agency of those under attack. Food
pantries could become places not just to fill bellies but to launch
protests, campaigns, and organizing drives. Ever more devastating
superstorms, floods, and forest fires could become moments not just
for acute disaster response but for sustained relationship-building
and communal resilience, aimed at repairing the societal fissures that
worsen extreme weather events.

Last month, the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social
Justice, where we both work, published a new report on the theory and
practice behind this approach to grassroots organizing, A Matter of
Survival: Organizing to Meet Unmet Needs and Build Power in Times of
Crisis
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Authored by our colleagues Shailly Gupta Barnes and Jarvis Benson, it
describes how — beginning during the Covid-19 pandemic and
continuing today — dozens of grassroots organizations,
congregations, mutual-aid collectives, artists, and others have been
building projects of survival and engaging in communal acts of care.

Over the coming months, the Kairos Center plans to draw inspiration
from such stories as we launch a new and ambitious national organizing
drive among the poor. The “Survival Revival,” as we call it, will
connect with and link the often-siloed survival struggles of the poor
into a more unified force. Together, we will study, strategize, sing,
pray, and take the kind of action that, as Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr., once put it
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be “a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.”
Together, we will lift from the bottom, so that everyone can rise.

_Copyright 2025 Liz Theoharis and Noam Sandweiss-Back. Cross-posted
with permission. May not be reprinted without permission from
TomDispatch [[link removed]]._

_LIZ THEOHARIS, a TomDispatch regular
[[link removed]], is a theologian,
ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist. Director of the Kairos
Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice
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Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival
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_NOAM SANDWEISS-BACK, born in Jerusalem and raised in New Jersey, is
an organizer and writer. He has spent a decade organizing among the
poor and dispossessed, including with the Kairos Center and the Poor
People’s Campaign [[link removed]]._

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