alonzomourning23
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I see this guy all the time on newbury street in boston, and thought it was cool to run into an article focussing on him.
Sparing a Dollar for Change
Local publication plays part in the burgeoning international street paper movement
For the last four and a half years, Keith Lovelace has spent most of his days standing in front of Newbury Street's Newbury Comics with a thick stack of newspapers in hand asking people to buy one, saying "help the homeless" and "help a brother out."
Lovelace, a Boston man in his 50s who is homeless, used to just panhandle on Newbury Street, but when some fellow homeless men told him they were making money selling Spare Change News on the streets of Boston and Cambridge, he decided to become a vendor. Lovelace said he thought he'd have better luck making money if he actually had something to sell.
"Selling the papers is a good thing," Lovelace said. "It's showing that we're still standin'. We're still fightin'."
Lovelace is one of about 80 active vendors who sell Spare Change throughout Boston and Cambridge. The vendors purchase newspapers, which are published every other Thursday by the non-profit agency, the Homeless Empowerment Project (HEP), for $.25 each. They then take to the streets and resell them for the cover price of $1.00, but sometimes people pay more.
"I got $100 for a paper once - for one paper," Lovelace said.
The content of the paper focuses on social justice and mainly on homelessness and poverty. Included in the paper are local and national news stories and poetry written by volunteer freelance writers, editorials, arts reviews and a section with personal stories written by people who are homeless or living in poverty.
Spare Change also runs stories written for street newspapers from around the country and the world through the Street News Service. The service takes the best stories from street newspapers in more than 40 cities throughout North America and makes them available to other papers. Independent street papers are produced in almost every major U.S. city, including Seattle, Chicago and San Francisco.
Samuel Scott, a 2002 graduate of Boston University's College of Communication and Spare Change's editor, said the paper has several missions, including advocating for the homeless, educating the public on issues relating to homelessness and giving the homeless and those living in poverty a way to learn business skills and earn some income.
"The main purpose of journalism is to educate and inform the public, but street journalism takes that one step further by informing the public on one set of issues that most papers don't care about," Scott said. "It's a niche market."
Scott, who has been the editor for about a year, said he is the first professional journalist the paper has hired in its 13-year history. Spare Change was started in 1992 by a group of homeless people looking for a way to make money, and two years later HEP was founded by people looking to help foster the growth of the paper.
Scott said they usually sell about 10,000 copies of each issue, but just 10 years ago, they sold triple the number.
"After Sept. 11, [2001] our sales plummeted to 7,000 to 9,000, but we're coming back up and trying to shoot back toward 30,000," Scott said.
Although the agency is non-profit and receives grants, Scott said it is struggling financially and that they are looking to increase the visibility of the paper and the number of advertisements since it currently only has two paid ads.
"We publish at a loss and lose money with every single issue," Scott said.
He also said Spare Change is looking for more vendors because they have recently lost a lot of sellers and don't know why.
Samuel Weems, who oversees distribution, said that one-ninth of the vendors are males and that many homeless people learn of the program through other vendors, as Lovelace did.
"Last week we got three new vendors through word-of-mouth," Weems said. "Vendors like to encourage people that they meet to do this."
Weems said when he sees people asking for change he often gives them his business card instead and encourages them to become a vendor.
Vendors have to pay cash up front for the papers and there are no returns. He said vendors buy an average of 30 papers per issue, but many only are able to buy a few and are not able to buy more papers until they sell one or two and can invest the profit into more papers. "If you only have one quarter and sell a paper and get $1 to $2 for that, then that's worth it," Weems said.
Lovelace said he has no idea how many papers he sells per issue, but that the number varies seasonally and that in the winter months he garners the least amount of money.
WORLDWIDE MOVEMENT
Street newspapering is a grassroots movement that has not only become widespread in North America, but throughout the world.
There are more than 100 street newspapers with a mission similar to that of Spare Change in 27 other countries, including Japan, Sweden and Germany.
The International Network of Street Newspapers (INSP), with offices in Glasgow, Scotland, provides support and advice for people who want to start street papers and lobbies on behalf of the street paper movement and marginalized people in general. INSP provides money through grants to start-up papers and papers that need help financially, according to Shane Halpin, the organization's Executive Director.
"The International Network of Street Paper's vision is to alleviate poverty and build a just, civil society in the world - one street paper at a time," Halpin wrote in an email.
Halpin said the first street newspapers emerged in the late 80s in Europe and the U.S. One of the most successful papers, The Big Issue, is sold throughout the United Kingdom and sells more than 155,000 copies a week.
He also said papers throughout the world differ in their approaches.
"Papers vary according to the political climate; in the U.S., for example, the papers tend to be more grassroots and advocacy-led, whilst in Britain and other parts of Europe they tend to be more commercially focused," Halpin wrote. "Often the two ideologies diverge, some arguing for the bottom-up approach over the top-down. The truth is no doubt somewhere in between."
Like Spare Change, Halpin said most other street papers struggle financially because most of the profit is spent on distribution costs (the vendors) and many have trouble earning advertising dollars.
"Street papers by their very nature are seen in some quarters to be anti-establishment even if they are not and so often fail to get mainstream support and advertising," Halpin wrote. "A more human reason for struggle also is that some papers, while having the motivation from a social perspective, often lack the business skills to put their ideas into action."
Scott said he is not only trying to increase advertising revenue but also awareness of the paper. He said many people know that there is a paper that homeless people sell, but that is about the extent of their knowledge.
A lot of people walk by and do not acknowledge Lovelace, but he also has regular customers who buy from him all of the time, he said.
Lovelace, originally from Trinidad, said he reads Spare Change, but has not yet contributed his personal story to the paper.
"I'm going to put my two words in one day and it will be the truth," Lovelace said. "I've been on this road more than 12 years now. It sucks, but life goes on. I'm still standing."
