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Maria Foscarinis is founder and executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty. Maria has advocated for solutions to homelessness at the national level since 1985. She was a primary architect of the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act, the first major federal legislation addressing homelessness, and she has litigated to secure the legal rights of homeless persons. Maria writes and speaks widely on legal and policy issues affecting homeless persons and is frequently quoted in the media.

Maria is a 1977 graduate of Barnard College and a 1981 graduate of Columbia Law School, where she was an editor of the Law Review. She also holds a M.A. in philosophy. After clerking for the Hon. Amalya L. Kearse of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, she was a litigation associate at Sullivan & Cromwell where she volunteered to take a pro bono case representing homeless families. In 1985, she left the firm to establish and direct a Washington office for the National Coalition for the Homeless before she founded the Law Center in 1989.

Karen Cunningham is the Law Center's legal director. Karen guides the Law Center's strategic use of public education, legislative and administrative advocacy, and litigation to further its mission to prevent and end homelessness and poverty in the United States and to secure official recognition of housing as a human right. She previously served the Law Center as its director of pro bono services, engaging law firms and lawyers from across the United States and internationally.

Before joining the Law Center, Karen was the director of legal services at Women Empowered Against Violence (WEAVE) in Washington, D.C. where she and her staff represented survivors of domestic violence in protection order, family law, and immigration matters, managed a robust pro bono program, and advocated for legislative and policy reforms directed toward reducing the incidence and impact of domestic violence. Following law school, Karen was awarded an Equal Justice Works Fellowship through which she founded and directed WEAVE's innovative and interdisciplinary Teen Dating Violence Program.

Karen graduated magna cum laude from the Georgetown University Law Center, where she was a founding member of The Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law. She received her B.A. with high honors from the University of Michigan.

Jeremy Rosen is the policy director for the Law Center. Jeremy previously served as executive director of the National Policy and Advocacy Council on Homelessness, as director for homelessness and mental health in the National Office of Volunteers of America, and as a staff attorney at Legal Services of Greater Miami. He received his B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1994, and his J.D. from George Washington University Law School in 1998.

Jeremy is an expert on federal, state, and local affordable housing policy, with a focus on homelessness, veterans housing, and housing for children, youth, and families. Jeremy's work also focuses on access to government benefits for low-income people, prisoner reentry, and the intersection of affordable housing policy and the education and child welfare systems. He is a frequent speaker on these topics, and has published numerous journal articles and papers.

Heather Maria Johnson coordinates the Civil Rights Project at the Law Center. She works with advocates to challenge city practices that criminalize homelessness. Heather serves as co-counsel in litigation, files amicus briefs, and serves as a resource for attorneys pursuing litigation. She also writes reports, articles, and other publications to provide legal guidance and information about the civil rights issues of homeless people.

In addition, Heather monitors civil rights issues throughout the country and provides technical assistance to advocates who are combating criminalization measures or working on voting issues. As part of the Civil Rights Program's public education initiative, she provides trainings related to strategies for challenging the criminalization of homelessness and promoting the voting rights of homeless persons.

Heather received her B.A. from the University of Virginia and her J.D. from Duke University School of Law, where she was a member of the Duke Law Journal. She also holds a M.A. in cultural anthropology. After clerking for the Hon. James P. Jones of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia, she was an associate at Latham & Watkins where she served as pro bono counsel in one of the Law Center's litigation matters challenging ordinances that criminalize homelessness.

Director of Human Rights and Children's Rights Programs

Eric Tars currently serves as the Law Center's human rights program director and children & youth staff attorney. In his human rights capacity, he works with homelessness and housing advocacy organizations to train and strategically utilize human rights as a component of their work. In his youth rights capacity, he works to protect homeless students' rights to education and advocates for homeless youth and families through trainings, litigation, and policy advocacy at the national and local levels.

Before coming to the Law Center, Eric was a Fellow with Global Rights' U.S. Racial Discrimination Program and consulted with Columbia University Law School's Human Rights Institute and the US Human Rights Network. Eric's work has spanned the country and the globe. He coordinated the involvement of hundreds of organizations in the hearings of the U.S. before the UN Committee Against Torture and Human Rights in 2006. Eric has conducted numerous trainings on integrating human rights strategies into domestic advocacy, and he currently serves as the chair of the US Human Rights Network's training committee and on the CERD Advisory Task Force of the Network.

Eric received his J.D. as a Global Law Scholar at the Georgetown University Law Center, and during that time served as a research assistant to Prof. Mari Matsuda, as a legal assistant at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and as law clerk at Harmon, Curran, Spielberg & Eisenberg, a law firm specializing in non-profit law. He received his B.A. in political science from Haverford College and studied international human rights in Vienna at the Institute for European Studies and at the University of Vienna.

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