Tafari currently lives in London, where he is coordinating the activities of the Homeless Front of the UK. The Homeless Front UK is a collective of homeless Londoners who seek to create a tent city as a sanctuary for themselves and for other Londoners without shelter.
The ‘tent city’ they envisage will be drug and alcohol free; a safe and secure place where homeless people can live while they seek work and make the transition to more permanent housing. This model provides the dispossessed with the sense that they have a home, which the common urban practice of government- or charity-provided overnight shelter for the homeless does not.
In the UK there are an estimated 400,000 ‘hidden homeless’ without a roof over their heads. In December 2006 the Homeless Front UK initiated its Out of the Doorways Campaign to empower and house some of these. As of December 15, 2006, the nascent HFUK has so far housed 11 of London’s ‘rough sleepers’.
By spearheading the creation of Dignity Village between 2000 and 2004, Jack Tafari pioneered the concept of the sanctioned tent city in Portland, Oregon. Now Tafari and his group want to “replicate dignity” in London, creating a flagship, eco-friendly tent city as a model for other UK cities where homelessness is a problem.
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