Biography
Anthony Prince serves as Lead Organizer and General Counsel for the National Union of the Homeless and the California Homeless Union/Statewide Organizing Council. The Union is an unincorporated association representing thousands of homeless, formerly homeless and marginally-housed persons collectively organizing for housing, protection of their constitutional, statutory and human rights and immediate improvement of current conditions. Anthony has spent a lifetime organizing, representing and empowering the most exploited and dispossessed of the working class His experience in housing justice is informed by years of service to the trade union movement as shop steward, grievance officer, executive board member, organizer, business agent, bargaining team member, contract administrator and legal counsel for the Steelworkers, Teamsters, SEIU, National Treasury Employees Union.
Under Anthony’s leadership, the California Homeless Union has won unprecedented legal victories in state and federal court as well as the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals relying primarily on the 14 th Amendment-based “state created danger” doctrine, the Americans With Disabilities Act and the right to “safety” enshrined in at least 13 state constitutions. Most important, Anthony is committed to using litigation not as an end in itself, but as a scaffold from which to empower the unhoused, halt life-threatening displacement of homeless communities and turn the encampments into staging grounds for housing and building the movement.
