Jack Tafari

He was best known for promoting "sanctioned tent cities" as transitional housing for homeless people, including himself, in Portland, Oregon, United States.

The Portland police department eventually realized that the group, then calling themselves Camp Dignity, was engaged in complicated Constitutional issues of redress of grievance, and deferred the political issue to the local political authority: The Portland City Council and Mayor".

The Mayor and Council granted the camp the status of a city "pilot project" and offered them a site seven miles from Portland at the Sunderland Recycling Yard.

[8] Faced with the prospect of another highly publicized parade of the indigent, Portland backed down, and allowed the campers two more months at the Fremont Bridge site.

[9] After protracted negotiations, Camp Dignity accepted Portland's offered site at the Sunderland Recycling Yard.

And today homeless people are harried and harassed, run from here to there, taxed by fines, commodified and used as a resource, sometimes brutalized, occasionally felonized and often used as slave labour by the prison industry.

[10]Dignity Village, a homeless camp incorporated in Portland, Oregon as a 501(c)(3) membership-based non-profit organization, is set up as a self-governing entity, and "residents" are bound by five rules of behaviour, contained in their membership agreement.

[5] The community has generated considerable international interest as a possible means of ameliorating the problem of developed world homelessness.

He resigned his position as CEO of Dignity Village and returned to London to receive medical treatment under the English National Health Service (NHS).

[16] In 2007 Tafari secured housing for himself when he was awarded a council flat on a Peabody Trust estate in Islington, north London.

He therefore set out to reconfigure his housing for the homeless strategy to suit the English legal and institutional landscape.

With a small network of co activists, he began scouting, cracking and legally registering squats as temporary housing for homeless people, sometimes working informally with organisations such as the Advisory Service for Squatters.

He left London in the company of another close friend, Maira Fenci, travelling first to Casablanca, and then to Accra, Ghana.