Minyan Tzedek Educated Activist lay-led, home-hosted book group meets quarterly to discuss selected books and films that help us deepen our understanding of the social issues we work on in our community organizing team. Marshall Ganz is one of the leading authorities on community organizing, and this book is the culmination of decades of teaching, research, and work. He explains how ordinary people can work together to turn the resources they have into the power they need to achieve real change in their lives. He explores the forces, craft, and learned skill of organizing and provides a framework for how to actually do it.

Minyan Tzedek Educated Activist lay-led, home-hosted book group meets quarterly to discuss selected books and films that help us deepen our understanding of the social issues we work on in our community organizing team. Natalie Foster, President of the Economic Security Project, is one of the leading architects behind guaranteed economic rights and prosperity for all. The Guarantee asks us to imagine an America where housing, healthcare, an inheritance, and an income floor are not only attainable by all, but guaranteed by our government for everyone. Foster blends brilliance, warmth and fierce focus to instill an optimistic confidence that America can choose a better path towards economic and racial justice.

This month’s Educated Activist Session will discuss When We Walk By: Forgotten Humanity, Broken Systems, and the Role We Can Each Play in Ending Homelessness in America by Kevin F. Adler and Donald W. Burnes. Think about the last time that you saw or interacted with an unhoused person. What did you do? What did you say? Did you offer money or a smile, or did you avert your gaze? When We Walk By takes an urgent look at homelessness in America, showing us what we lose-in ourselves and as a society- when we choose to walk past and ignore our neighbors in shelters, insecure housing, or on the streets- and, it illuminates what we stand to gain when we embrace our humanity and move towards evidence-based, people-first, community-driven solutions. The authors recast chronic homelessness in the U.S. as a byproduct of twin crises: Our social systems are failing and so is our humanity. We will learn the social and political forces that shape myths about those who are homeless; and that for many Americans, housing insecurity is just one paycheck away.

This month’s Educated Activist Session will discuss Homelessness is a Housing Problem: How structural Problems Explain U.S. Patterns by Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern. Colburn and Aldern shift their focus from the individual experiencing homelessness to the metropolitan area. Using accessible analysis, they test a range of conventional beliefs about what drives the prevalence of homelessness in a given city- including mental illness, drug use, poverty, weather, and low-income mobility- and find that none explain the regional variation observed across the country. Instead, they argue, housing market conditions such as the cost and availability of rental housing offer a far more convincing account.