Alice Callaghan (born circa 1947, Calgary, Alberta) is an Episcopalian priest and a former Roman Catholic nun. She is also an advocate of the homeless and impoverished people of downtown Los Angeles.
Her family moved from Canada to southern California when she was a small child. Diminutive and athletic, she became a proficient surfer in Newport Beach.[1] She attended college and became a nun. She left the convent in order to become an Episcopalian priest. Seeing the grinding poverty of skid row, she decided to "make [herself] useful there."
Callaghan participated in anti-war protests during the Vietnam War.[2]
Callaghan founded Las Familias del Pueblo, a Skid Row community center,[3] in June 1981 in a one-room storefront near the neighborhood.[4] She remained its director as of 2021, when it moved to a larger building.[5] She also founded the SRO Housing Trust.
As of 1982, she was an associate minister at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena.
In May 1983, she led a protest demanding that the city of Los Angeles install a traffic light on one block of Sixth Street, citing concerns for children crossing the street in the area.[6]
In the late 1990s, Callaghan worked as a tutor for young Latino immigrant students. In 1998, she supported Proposition 227, which largely dismantled California's bilingual education system, on the grounds that Spanish-speaking students were not being taught English nor receiving an equivalent education to English-speaking students.[7]