Erin Earl

I signed up for the Street Papers focus group because it was the only Honors Seminar that fit with my schedule – and I needed to take a seminar to graduate this quarter. I was vaguely interested in the subject; I did see homelessness as a fundamental problem of society that needed to be addressed, but mostly I had a “wait and see what it’s like” attitude about the course. As the course started and I learned more about what a street paper is and what it does, I began to find the course interesting for its own sake, and not for the two credits that would allow me to graduate. I learned so much that I didn’t know before about homelessness and street papers and how they affect and are affected by society. For example, Tim’s speech about the explosion of homelessness in the eighties really surprised me. Like so many others in my generation, I thought that homelessness was simply one of the evils that came with urbanization; we helped as much as we could but never had any real hope it would ever actually go away. That is, when I thought about the problem at all.

As for street papers, I had no idea how widespread the movement was, or even how deeply involved Real Change was in the Seattle community. I had, of course, seen vendors when going to buy books at the U Bookstore or groceries at the Safeway on 50th, and even bought and read the newspaper a couple of times. But I always thought it was something that was just kind of there – I never thought about how it would be run, or why it came into existence, or what long term goals it was trying to accomplish. I thought it was an interesting paper, and then forgot about it.

But those issues I never thought about before make up a good deal of what I found interesting in this class: I really was interested in what the philosophies of the papers were, why they were that way (funding, religion, larger social organizations) and how they organized themselves to fulfill their particular philosophy.

I found Norma Green’s speech about the history of street papers absolutely fascinating – I never would have guessed they went back to the 19th century. Although she does not specifically deal with the organizational models we discussed in class, she does give the affiliations of the first street papers and a brief summary of their content. I find it interesting that the street papers originated from a religious charity organization, when so much of what the street paper movement has been about is self-help and dignity, rather than charity and handouts. The history of the movement was interesting, but I was most interested in the models we looked at: particularly the corporate social business, making profits to be turned into social services; the more radical grassroots voice of the poor; and Real Change, which usually manages to fall somewhere in between.

The Big Issue is the epitome of a social business; it is and has always been perfectly honest about that. It exists to make money, and then it feeds the profits back into social benefits for poor people. Coming up from the Streets gives a slightly biased, but interesting look at the philosophy behind the Big Issue. Started by a socially responsible corporation, there was pressure from the beginning to make the street paper a self-sustaining, profitable organization. The magazine does address issues about the poor and homeless: they have a page on missing persons, several vendor profile articles, as well as articles about policies on homelessness. However, they also have movie and music reviews, sections on how to style your hair, and celebrity interviews. In the book about the Big Issue, Tessa Swithinbank addresses the issue of content in the magazine. She says that they made a conscious decision to make an appeal to larger audiences and include articles that had nothing to do with homelessness, or being the voice of the poor. According to the social business model, this is a necessary decision: by including “fluff” in the street paper, you increase circulation and therefore profit, sending more money into whatever social programs the social business is running.

However, when Daniéle Torck did his academic examination of street papers for Discourse and Society, he looked at four street papers, the Big Issue (Bristol edition), L’Itinerant, Z-magazine, and Street Sheet, with the idea of evaluating how well they represented the voice of the homeless – not how well they did what they said they had setout to do, not how much they helped homeless people in general – purely voice of the poor. He came to the conclusion that none of those four gave a real platform to homeless people, and also “fail[ed] to assure them a new self-respect” (Torck, 388). He then goes on to speculate, on the basis of these four papers, that these problems may be inherent within the concept of a street paper in general. While I respect Torck for doing research in the rather academically uncharted area of street newspapers, I have to question this conclusion – especially after having only done a rather cursory examination of only four papers. Volunteering at Real Change, I have personally spoken to many vendors who feel very differently – they feel that Real Change expresses many of their opinions pretty well, and they very much enjoy a new sense of self-respect. Obviously that is not going to be the case for every homeless person, but no one program can hope to help everybody. Perhaps the four papers Torck examined were not the best voices of the poor and homeless; I personally do not think that warrants dismissing street papers as altogether useless.

The “voice of the poor” philosophy is one that I think is very interesting, but not one with which I have had much practical experience. We discussed the philosophy in an abstract sense during class, while coming up with survey questions. However, none of our readings really gave an in depth example of a successful street paper that was entirely constructed to represent the voice of the marginalized, so I am still not very educated about this particular model. It is a fascinating philosophy because the poor and homeless are a very heterogeneous, diverse group of people – what exactly constitutes their voice? Must a poor or homeless person in order always write the articles published in a “voice of the poor” street paper for it to have any validity? What is the role of, and is there a role for, any non-marginalized people involved with the paper, if everything is run by the poor and homeless? My personal opinion is that if a street paper is too adamant about being a voice of the poor, it will run into organizational, financial, and even ideological problems. I am sure it can and has been done successfully, but I think it is a much more difficult philosophy to maintain in real life. That being said, I do still think that representing the marginalized is something that street papers of all models and organizational principles should keep in mind as a goal – perhaps not the goal, but certainly a goal.

Volunteering at Real Change, I have been able to have able to observe first-hand how a street paper organization somewhere between social business and grassroots activism can function – and function very smoothly, for the most part. There are so many parts of running a street newspaper that I never would have guessed, occasionally buying Real Change. Turf systems, exchanging chores for papers, vendor disagreements and complaints, new vendor orientations, street writing programs, vendor mail (using Real Change as a permanent address) – all these and more are set up so that the entire operation runs smoothly. If nothing else, this course has definitely taught me a profound respect for street newspapers and the people that run them. Just working the front desk at Real Change, I sometimes feel swamped – I cannot imagine how much worse it must get as you climb the organizational ladder.

In conclusion, while I was aware of Real Change before I took this class, it has really opened my eyes to the depth and breadth of the street paper movement. I was fascinated by all the different kinds of street papers there were – and how so many of them do not seem to get along, even though they are all essentially trying to do the same thing: help the poor and homeless. At the same time, I was amazed by how much these street papers could accomplish, and the complexity of the organizations that ran them. While street papers are probably not the ultimate solution – they simply cannot help enough people enough – they have proven to me that they really help people trying to get out of bad situations. In my opinion, the ultimate solution will have to be in government policy, but the street paper movement is a powerful way to influence that policy, and to help at least a few people so long as policy is not what it needs to be. On a more personal level, I have learned how widespread the homeless issues are, and discovered ways that I, personally, can help the problem – by volunteering at organizations that help, and by keeping myself aware of what the issues and policies are.