For Anderson Curtis, housing equity work begins with a simple but urgent question: “What are we willing to do to not allow another person to die outside?”
That sense of urgency shapes how Anderson shows up as a Housing Equity Strategist with Community Solutions and as the Policy Organizer for the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut. He describes himself in three words: “fearless, honest, inspiring.” Those qualities come through in the way he speaks about his work, his lived experience, and the systems he is committed to changing.
Anderson’s housing journey is deeply connected to his experience cycling in and out of Connecticut’s prisons over a 20-year period. After being released from incarceration, he began to understand his story not only as a criminal legal system journey, but as a housing journey. A conversation with Community Solutions helped him name that connection more clearly. “It was at that conversation where my 18 years out of incarceration had dawned on me that this has been a housing journey,” he said.
Before becoming a Housing Equity Strategist, Anderson worked directly with people navigating housing instability, incarceration, recovery, and reentry. One turning point came while he was a case manager at 68 Pierpont in New Haven. He learned that housing work was about more than managing beds or money. It was about people.
He remembers knocking on a resident’s door just to check in. “The first thing he said was, ‘What did I do wrong?’ And I said, ‘Nothing. I’m just here to talk to you.’” The man began to cry. “He was so lonely,” Anderson said.
That moment stayed with him. It revealed the loneliness and despair that people often carry quietly while navigating systems that see their paperwork before their humanity.
Anderson brings that lesson into everything he does. Whether he is organizing at the Capitol, speaking with legislators, mentoring students, or supporting people returning from incarceration, he is focused on preserving dignity. “Never forgetting the humanity and dignity of everyone,” he said. “That is so central to everything.”
For Anderson, meaningful engagement is not symbolic. It is about building power with people. “I am now into building people power and making moments,” he said. He models this in small but important ways. When he introduces someone he met in a shelter setting, he does not identify them by their housing status or disclose their story. He creates equity in the conversation. “I don’t out anybody. I don’t shame anybody. There’s no shame when I talk to people. My invitation does not include shame.”
That approach reflects how Anderson thinks about power-sharing with people who have lived experience. He is clear that inviting people into the room is not enough. “Inviting people with lived experience in homelessness requires yielding power by allowing people to create their own programming and then investing in power by paying people what they’re worth.”
He is also honest about the barriers. One of the biggest, he says, is tokenism. Another is when organizations “overpromise and underdeliver,” creating deeper mistrust. Anderson believes systems must shift their perspective. When a person is struggling, the question should not be how that person failed. The question should be how the system failed them.
His own life taught him that. When he sought help for substance use while on probation, a treatment program discharged him early because insurance dictated a lower level of care. “I said, ‘You can’t do this. You’re going to send me back to jail.’” That is what happened. “That’s where I learned that I didn’t fail, the system failed me.”
Anderson’s work today is broad and deeply relational. He serves on the board of the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness, is a deacon at Asylum Hill Congregational Church, partners with the League of Women Voters, and speaks with students across Connecticut. He also holds an associate degree in addiction counseling from Gateway Community College, where he was named the 2009 DARC Student of the Year.
Still, when people ask about his education, Anderson pushes them to think beyond formal credentials. “Which one do you want?” he asks. “The education I learned not to go back to prison, the education that I learned how to stay at the ACLU, the education I learned how to be effective in the legislative office building?”
For him, lived experience is knowledge. It is strategy. It is a kind of education that cannot be separated from survival.
Now, Anderson is developing a project called Just Us, a vision for a halfway house led by formerly incarcerated women. He chose to focus on women because, as he put it, they have “the fewest resources in DOC and the greatest need.” The project reflects his broader belief that people closest to the issue should lead the solutions.
Even as his work expands, Anderson remains grounded in responsibility, family, and the urgency of care. “Responsibility is a choice,” he said. He also asks a question that sits at the center of systems change work: “How do you prioritize what’s most urgent when everything feels urgent?”
For Anderson, the answer begins with people. It begins with honesty, directness, and refusing to let systems hide behind process while people suffer. It begins with making moments that remind people of their own power.
“I’m one of you, I’m one of them, but I’m mostly me,” he said.
That is the kind of leadership Anderson brings to housing equity: rooted in truth, shaped by survival, and committed to making sure the system stops failing people.
