Liz Theoharis

Executive director, Kairos Center; co-chair, the Poor People’s Campaign

The Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis is executive director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights & Social Justice and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. She is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and teaches at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York.

She has been organizing among poor and low-income communities for 30 years and has been recognized, along with the Rev. Dr. William Barber II, for work with the Poor People’s Campaign.

In 2020, she was named one of 15 Faith Leaders to Watch by the Center for American Progress. In 2019, she was named a Selma Bridge Award recipient, as well as one of 11 Women Shaping the Church by Sojourners. In 2018, she, with Barber, gave a TED Talk at TEDWomen called “A Call for a Moral Revival” and was named one of the Politico 50 “thinkers, doers and visionaries whose ideas are driving politics.”

Theoharis is the editor of “We Cry Justice: Reading the Bible With the Poor People’s Campaign” and the author of “Always With Us? What Jesus Really Said About the Poor.”