23-04-2025
Authors fighting poverty visiting Binghamton
BINGHAMTON, N.Y. (WIVT/WBGH) – Some longtime crusaders against poverty are bringing a hopeful message to Binghamton this week. Co-Authors Reverend Liz Theoharis and Noam Sandweiss-Back are launching an organizing tour of Upstate New York at United Presbyterian Church on Chenango Street on Friday.
They're also promoting their new book, 'You Only Get What You're Organized To Take: Lessons From The Movement to End Poverty.' Theoharis is the Executive Director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice. She has been active in grassroots organizing for the past 30 years.
Theoharis says it's essential to have poor people at the center of the organizing effort.
'It was time to document some of those stories, and especially some of the lessons from that grassroots organizing. A lot of times, the stories of poor and low-income people organizing for change are not told,' Theoharis said.
The authors say they've included several lessons of success on both a local and national level. One example they highlight, is the decision by the federal government to expand the child tax credit during the pandemic, which lifted millions of people out of poverty. Sandweiss-Back says grassroots heroes and heroines have also proven that change is possible.
'We don't have a scarcity of resources in this country. And that we do have objective abundance all around us. And that it is the responsibility of our government to care for its citizens and to channel that abundance in the direction of the uplifting of entire generations,' Sandweiss-Beck said.
Theoharis and Sandweiss-Back say their goal is social transformation that addresses the root causes and solutions to poverty. Doors open at 6 p.m. Friday at United Presbyterian with the presentation beginning at 6:30.
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