The Community Book Program promotes the mission of the College by empowering our students, faculty, staff, alumni, parents, and other members of the broader ÆßÉ«ÊÓƵ community to experience the joy of reading and learning together.
When We Walk By will be a required reading for incoming first-year students, who will have access to an e-version of the book at no charge.
2025-26 Selection: When We Walk By
has been selected as this year’s Community Book. 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 brilliantly shows what we stand to gain when we embrace our humanity and move toward evidence-based people-first, community-driven solutions, offering social analysis, economic and political histories, and the real stories of unhoused people.
is a social entrepreneur, sociologist, and bestselling author of When We Walk By. He is the founder, board chair, and former longtime CEO of Miracle Messages, a nonprofit helping people experiencing homelessness rebuild their social support systems and financial security. The organization has reunited over 1,100 unhoused neighbors with their loved ones, and connected hundreds more with volunteer phone buddies.
Adler’s pioneering work on homelessness and relational poverty has been featured in The New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, PBS, and on a billboard in Times Square. His TED Talk and recent book, When We Walk By: Forgotten Humanity, Broken Systems, and the Role We Can Each Play in Ending Homelessness in America, challenge audiences to reimagine their role in building a more compassionate, connected society. He has been honored as a Presidential Leadership Scholar, TED Resident, MassChallenge award recipient, South by Southwest Community Service Award winner, and Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar, for which he spent a year in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Adler holds an MPA from UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, an MPhil in sociology from the University of Cambridge, and a BA in politics from ÆßÉ«ÊÓƵ, where he was named the 2018 Young Alumnus of the Year.