Event
Our next round of Chats are dedicated to undergrad Urbies (or those thinking about majoring), with URBS alumni sharing their experiences and answering your questions.
Alumni bios are below, sign up here!
Hannah Weiss ‘11 | Program Director, NYC Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants
Hannah works on housing and homeless policy, as they intersect with trauma, race equity, buildings/ safety codes, and welfare systems. Seeking to understand the power of public systems and how to move them, Hannah has worked in direct service (including as a case manager in a supportive housing program), federal policy and technical assistance (including collecting data for HUD’s annual report on homelessness to Congress and drafting guidance to accompany President Obama’s Rule on Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing), for the court-appointed monitor of child welfare systems under class action lawsuits (conducting qualitative and quantitative data analysis and writing reports), and now in local government (managing interagency programs that focus on tenants at the verge of homelessness). Along the way, she got a Masters in City Planning at MIT.
Industry, interests, and/or areas of expertise: Housing/ homeless policy; local government; seeking out multiple perspectives (direct service, policy research, government); trauma-informed city planning
Rev Dr. Liz Theoharis ‘98 | Director, Kairos Center and Co-Chair, Poor People's Campaign
The Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis is the Director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary. She is the Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival with the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II that organized the largest coordinated wave of nonviolent civil disobedience in 21st Century America and has since emerged as one of the nation’s leading social movement forces. An organizer, biblical scholar, mother and clergy member, Liz is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA), teaches at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, and helps lead the Freedom Church of the Poor. Liz 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. She has been published in the NY Times, Time Magazine, CNN, The Guardian, Sojourners, The Nation, the Washington Post, and many others and gave the “Building a Moral Movement” TEDtalk and other distinguished lectures.
Liz is the author of Always with Us?: What Jesus Really Said about the Poor (Eerdmans, 2017) and editor of We Cry Justice: Reading the Bible with the Poor People’s Campaign (Broadleaf, 2021). She is co-author of Revive Us Again: Vision and Action in Moral Organizing (Beacon, 2018).
Industry, interests, and/or areas of expertise: Anti-poverty and anti-racist organizing and movement building