Are you a reader who cares about building a vibrant and equitable community in Southern Arizona? If so, this book club is for you! Tucson Agenda co-founder Caitlin Schmidt is teaming up with the Tucson Tome Gnome and the Community Foundation for Southern Arizona to host a solutions-focused community book club.
This book club aims to bring together interested community members from all walks of life to bond over a shared desire to make our community better for all – and be inspired by a shared reading experience! We can’t promise we can solve all the world’s (or Southern Arizona’s) problems, but we can connect, learn from each other, and build momentum toward positive change.
When: November 30, 2023 | 5:00 to 7:00 PM
Where: Community Foundation Campus
Book: Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond
Please RVSP using the form below. Light refreshments will be provided.
About the Book
The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a new and bracing argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it.
The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages?
In this landmark book, acclaimed sociologist Matthew Desmond draws on history, research, and original reporting to show how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor. Those of us who are financially secure exploit the poor, driving down their wages while forcing them to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. We prioritize the subsidization of our wealth over the alleviation of poverty, designing a welfare state that gives the most to those who need the least. And we stockpile opportunity in exclusive communities, creating zones of concentrated riches alongside those of concentrated despair. Some lives are made small so that others may grow.
Elegantly written and fiercely argued, this compassionate book gives us new ways of thinking about a morally urgent problem. It also helps us imagine solutions. Desmond builds a startlingly original and ambitious case for ending poverty. He calls on us all to become poverty abolitionists, engaged in a politics of collective belonging to usher in a new age of shared prosperity and, at last, true freedom.
