NLIHC’s 2023 Housing Policy Forum will offer participants an array of opportunities to engage with and learn from thought-leaders, tenant and community leaders, policy experts, researchers, affordable housing practitioners, and leaders from Capitol Hill who will discuss America’s affordable housing crisis and its solutions. The forum will feature keynote addresses by acclaimed sociologist Matthew Desmond and the Reverend William J. Barber II, a renowned scholar and social activist. The forum will also celebrate the launch of Desmond’s new book, Poverty, by America.
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Matthew Desmond |
Matthew Desmond is a professor of sociology at Princeton University and the author of four books, including Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016), which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Carnegie Medal, and the PEN / John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. The principal investigator at Princeton’s Eviction Lab, Desmond focuses his research on poverty, city life, housing insecurity, public policy, racial inequality, and ethnography in America. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award, and the William Julius Wilson Early Career Award. A contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, Desmond was named by Politico in 2016 as one of the 50 people most influencing national political discourse. |
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The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II |
The Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II is president and senior lecturer for the organization Repairers of the Breach, a co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, and a bishop with The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries. For more than a quarter century, he has pastored the Greenleaf Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Goldsboro, North Carolina, and he is the author of four books: We Are Called to Be a Movement; Revive Us Again: Vision and Action in Moral Organizing; The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice Movement; and Forward Together: A Moral Message for the Nation. Rev. Dr. Barber served as president of the North Carolina NAACP from 2006-2017 and served on the National NAACP Board of Directors from 2008-2020. A former Mel King Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he is currently visiting professor of public theology and activism at Union Theological Seminary and senior fellow at Auburn Seminary. Rev. Dr. Barber has received the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Award, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center’s Beloved Community Award, and the Puffin Award. Signed copies of his latest book, We Are Called to Be a Movement, will be available for purchase at the forum. |
Additional speakers will be announced in the coming weeks. Registration for the event will open on November 28, 2022.