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 than 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 trying to defend their 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 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; 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.
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